Internet Democracy Project

Remember we had begun to use rangoli as a way to explain networking concepts? We have turned that exercise into a video now! Well, some parts of it — watch it here. With the support of Greenhost and the Totem Project, we made an explainer video that goes into …   More

(This article was first published in Asia Times. You can find the link to the original article here.) In the last week of July, two events happened in rapid succession: the release of India’s much-awaited draft data-protection legislation, and a breaking news story that Watson, IBM’s computing system that …   More

Aadhaar has been pitted as the snake oil of choice for various problems in society, including that of gender biased sex selection. In two proposals, one by Maneka Gandhi and another by two doctors, the tracking of women’s pregnancies is advocated as the means to monitor and curb the practice of gender-biased sex selection. But both these proposals seek to normalise surveillance of the bodies, decisions and data of women and girls, under the garb of ensuring their welfare. Ramya Chandrasekhar traces the various harmful consequences of using surveillance as the instrument of choice to eliminate the practice of gender biased sex selection, in a piece first published in the Indian Express.   More

Will the final Aadhaar hearings that started this week, on 17 Janiuary, bring some relief where the privacy concerns of India’s people are concerned? Will our future world be one in which citizens’ autonomy, decision-making capacity and bodily integrity are further fostered or will we be saddled with architectures and ecosystems that fundamentally and continuously undermine these? Taking gender and the body as starting point, Dr. Anja Kovacs explains what is at stake in the Supreme Court case on Aadhaar and why there is no reason to be too hopeful yet, in this article first published in India Today.   More

(Originally published on Asia Times. Link here.) While the US seems to be busy unraveling progressive net neutrality protections passed during the Obama administration, India’s Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) is putting down roots for one of the strongest net neutrality frameworks in the world. In a detailed …   More

“Break it down.” ​“Lose the jargon.” ​“No, you may not borrow any more salt and pepper shakers and move them around!” Sound familiar? Participants at COCONET digital rights camp, reproducing a rangoli design drawn on paper, which was a representation of local area networks (LAN) and wide area networks (WAN). …   More

As the Internet Democracy Project’s research on women’s safety apps has shown, many such apps fail to measure up to the promises they make. But does that mean mobile phone apps have no role to play in making spaces safer for women? Some developers believe taking a different approach …   More

On 24 August, the Supreme Court of India ruled that, contrary to what the government had argued, Indians do have a fundamental right to privacy. For women, sexual minorities and other marginalised people in India, this judgement has potentially far-reaching consequences. This is especially because the Supreme Court has noted repeatedly that the right to privacy doesn’t only include the right to be left alone, but also to decision-making about personal life and to control information about oneself. Read on to find out more about our views on this important ruling. This post was first published in the Hindustan Times, on 30 August.   More

The Internet Democracy Project’s recently released work on gender and surveillance in India was featured in this week’s episode of the NDTV documentary program ​‘India Matters’, which looked at online websites with feminist content. From Pinjra Tod and Agents of Ishq – an online multimedia project on love, sex and desire – to stories of women scientists who are pushing boundaries to produce important works on the field of science, these feminist sites act not just as influencers but also as agents of change.   More