Privacy practices in the Indian technology ecosystem
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Privacy practices in the Indian technology ecosystem

A 2020 survey of the makers of products and services

All submissions
Anand Venkatanarayanan

Anand Venkatanarayanan

@anandvenkatanarayanan

Nadika N

Nadika N

@nadikanadja

Kiran Jonnalagadda

Kiran Jonnalagadda

@jace Editor

Respondent organizations and designations

Submitted Apr 18, 2021

182 respondents completed the survey. They were asked for their organization and designation as optional plain text fields.

Designations were normalized to group equivalent roles and are represented in this word cloud:

Word cloud of designations

These normalized designations were further classified by whether they represent positions of authority:

  • Authority: Senior Manager, Product Manager, Founder, Director, CEO, Co-founder, Founder, CTO, and similar
  • Authority: Data Scientist, Senior Data Scientist, Product Designer and similar
  • Not authority: All other designations including Software Engineer, Developer and Consultant

The resulting split:

Authority Not authority
121 61

Organization names were normalized for typos and legal suffixes and to expand commonly used abbreviations, and were then categorized by size into small, medium and large:

  • Small: less than $10m in revenue or funding, or fewer than 100 employees
  • Medium: $10m–$100m in revenue or funding, or 100–500 employees
  • Large: more than $100m in revenue or funding, or more than 500 employees

Some organizations could not be identified from the public record. The resulting distribution:

Organization size Authority Not authority Total % Authority
Small 50 19 69 72.46%
Medium 33 8 41 80.48%
Large 32 25 57 56.14%
Unidentified 06 09 15 40.00%
Total 121 61 182 66.48%

167 of 182 respondents identified 137 distinct organizations. Some organizations had more than one respondent.

Organization size Respondents = 1 = 2 = 3 > 3
Small 69 63 6 0 0
Medium 41 32 6 2 1
Large 57 48 7 1 1
Total 167 143 19 3 2

Respondents were also asked to choose from a predefined list of technology domain areas they felt their organizations operated under:

Question 6: Technology domain area(s) of your organization (Multiple choice)

  1. Fin-Tech (Banking, Finance, Insurance, Lending, Insurance etc) (V1)
  2. Data Security (Infrastructure Security, Tools, Products etc.) (V2)
  3. Big Data (Large data processors, AI, ML) (V3)
  4. Services and Consultancy (for clients) (V4)
  5. Social networking/Media (V5)
  6. Mobile Application development/services (V6)
  7. Gaming and Entertainment (V7)
  8. Others (Descriptive answers) (V8)
Organization size V1 V2 V3 V4 V5 V6 V7 V8 Count
Small 11 15 12 32 13 18 04 29 69
Medium 10 08 16 18 04 07 02 14 41
Large 15 13 16 13 03 12 02 13 57
Unidentified 02 04 08 06 02 05 00 00 15
Total 38 40 52 69 22 42 08 56 182

From this, we infer:

  • The sample represents a broad base of views rather than that of a narrow segment.

  • The survey sample has a bias towards small and medium organizations (SMEs; 110/182 respondents), and towards authority roles (121/182).

  • These biases combine to create a stronger representation for authority roles in small and medium organizations (83/114), representing their views better than authority roles in large organizations.

All submissions

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