Inside India’s booming dark data economy
India’s booming dark data economy: spyware, detectives, data brokers, scammers—all that and more. Thanks to lax privacy laws and high consumer demand, details on everything from how you shop to who you date are all for sale. Read the story on Rest of World [https://restofworld.org/2020/
Why the event-oriented structure of news doesn't help in understanding how the world works
In 2020, I significantly reduced the proportion of daily news consumption in my information diet. And I strongly recommend the same to others: less of news and more of books. There are many reasons why, and I will list them in a future post. Here is one compelling argument from
How interlinked economic and political forces create self-censorship in Indian media
Most contemporary discussions on press freedom begin with some sort of rankings: X country slipped Y positions on Z index—that’s evidence something wrong is happening. This makes headlines every year in India, as we continue to slip down in these indices. Criminal defamation cases are filed against journalists
Investigation: Faulty ventilators procured by the Indian government for COVID-19 management
In the last week of May 2020, I began working on a story with HuffPost India on what we thought would be a celebration of Indian ingenuity: A startup called AgVa had teamed up with Maruti Suzuki to build what they claimed was the world’s cheapest, smallest and most
Indian Govt Trots Out Meaningless Data As COVID-19 Cases Rocket Despite Lockdown
The Indian government is using incomplete national-level data to justify arbitrary policy decisions, defend its record, and underplay the extent of the COVID-19 crisis.
Confused about Aarogya Setu? Here is a guide to think about your privacy
Many are concerned that Aarogya Setu, India’s contact tracing app, is a privacy disaster, [https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-52659520] a mass surveillance project masquerading as a tool for public health interventions. Well, the privacy concerns are obvious: the purpose of the app is to track you. It asks
India is pinning hopes on apps in virus fight
Indian public authorities are building apps—at least 17 are public—to fight COVID-19. In Mint, I wrote about the app ecosystem looking at two big products: Central government’s Aarogya Setu and Maharashtra government’s MahaKavach to explore what the apps can do, what they can’t and where
The murky world of India’s fintech scams
Wallets and UPI have taken over the Indian digital payment ecosystem. The reduction of friction in payments is driving the growth of new businesses. But it is also orchestrating fraud: thousands of Indians experience digital payment frauds every day, with sums ranging from a few thousand rupees to several lakhs.
How Chinese dating apps are exploiting the loneliness of India’s men
Dozens of scammy Chinese dating apps are exploiting the loneliness of Indian men outside of the Tinder-Bumble demographic. That includes India’s most downloaded dating app in 2019, L’amour. It’s as mainstream as it can get. What happens when men sign up? How does the machinery operate behind
Why India is falling behind in the Y2Q race
Encryption forms the backbone of secure cyberspace. It helps to protect the data we send, receive or store. Behind the high degree of confidence in the security of the most commonly used encryption algorithms, like RSA, lies an assumption: modern computers, including the fastest supercomputers, will take forever to factor
