By Kanishk Gaur
The information sovereignty debate appears to be taking a new path with the government announcing new recommendations for intermediaries, creating it compulsory for messaging platforms and digital publishers, aggregators of content with a considerable presence in India (fifty lakh plus registered customers) to comply to these recommendations. The timing appears timid provided the social media battle in between the state and protestors of 3 farm bills.
While the government intends to tackle fake news, misinformation, and on the net harms seriously, storage of information and facts will develop new safety and third party dangers. The recommendations aim to bring a sense of ownership, duty, and accountability for these aggregating news.
The new recommendations will also effect messaging, with new guidelines mandating platforms to trace the 1st originator. However, traceability may perhaps be tougher to implement than envisaged.
Traceability of more than 40 crore messaging platform customers could open a pandora’s box? Given that the nation has no privacy laws in spot, any breach of customer information held by intermediaries would expose Indian consumers’ metadata, creating them vulnerable to device-level hijacking by unknown state or state-sponsored actors?
While the government mandates intermediary to periodically, at least as soon as a year, inform its customers of guidelines and regulations, privacy policy, user agreements, it will be fascinating to see how the government implements this, specifically for platforms with no legal presence in India.
While the mandate to intermediaries to deploy technologies-based measures to fight on the net harms is a welcome move, the genuine challenge will be to get platforms like Telegram and Signal to implement these, provided they do not gather any kind of metadata or incorporate AI to detect material.
Another essential difficult aspect for intermediaries will be altering the present finish-to-finish encryption regular. Complying to recommendations will demand fingerprinting of messages with out compromising users’ chat content?
Traceability of the 1st originator will demand private messaging apps to retain more information on users’ texts, like metadata about messages that numerous platforms presently delete. They would now want to retailer hash values of messages for a significant quantity of customers. All of this will demand intermediaries to implement new-age monitoring, huge information analytics tools which use AI and machine understanding algorithms this could imply considerable operational fees. The timeline set by the government are unreasonable to set up an infrastructure to monitor such significant user content.
The common principles of on the net curated content for publishers are vague. Publishers also want to figure out no matter if the content can be detrimental to India’s friendly relations with foreign nations. Which implies on the net curated content requires to be aligned to government foreign policy objective? This will have severe repercussions as the government’s foreign policy objective is more dependent on the ruling party in energy. Curbing freedom of expression of digital media could imply the government advocating its policy objectives by means of state-controlled media.
Content classification for a publisher of on the net curated content is a welcome step, nonetheless, how the government tends to make digital content publishers implement this will be an region to watch out for.
The author is founder, India Future Foundation. Views are individual