This week, the Union cabinet saw a major reshuffle. This included new ministers for MEITY, MOC, and MIB. We wrote to the new ministers, welcoming them to their new role and highlighting key areas that need to be addressed.
Since our last report for the month of May, IFF has filed 18 RTI requests, 2 First Appeals and 1 Second Appeal. Here, we give you an overview of the requests filed and why demanding transparency and accountability from Government authorities essential in our fight to protect digital rights.
IFF has submitted its comments on the IDEA consultation paper. We suggest that all implementation be halted till farmers have been consulted. We have also addressed issues of data localisation, federalism, data protection, user rights, the need for public investment, and inadequate data standards.
The Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers’ Welfare has recently signed 4 more MoUs regarding the Agristack with Patanjali Organic Research Institute, ESRI India Technologies, Amazon Web Services, and Star Agribazaar. Here, we analyse these MoUs, and explain what they mean for Indian agriculture.
In response to an RTI query by us, the Ministry of Agriculture provided us with a MoU between the Department of Agriculture and Microsoft, and a document titled “Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) for verifying Farmer’s Database (100 Villages)”.
The government recently announced that Microsoft would be conducting a pilot for the Agristack. Along with several other organisations, we wrote to the Union Minister for Agriculture, asking for further consultations, highlighting the need for statutory backing, and demanding greater transparency.
In the final piece in our series on the Data Protection Bill, we first explain the 7 fundamental principles of the Indian Privacy Code. Then we analyse two alternative data protection bills: the Data (Privacy and Protection) Bill, 2017 and the Personal Data and Information Privacy Code Bill, 2019.
We analyse Facebook's recently announced Human Rights Policy. It is too little, too late, and we call on it to improve its practices openly and transparently for Indian users of its platforms.
2020 has been quite the eventful year, and the policy front was no different. Here is a quick breakdown of all that we achieved this year. For 2021, we hope to further increase our collaboration to increase the impact of digital rights across the spectrum of individual liberty and social welfare.
We analysed the privacy of policies of the 4 large telecom service providers to check not only whether they were Puttaswamy-compliant, but also whether they would need updating in the face of the Personal Data Protection Bill, 2019. We found certain alarming issues in these policies.