Covid Surveillance and Privacy in India

The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in several global systems failing, systems originally built to handle emergencies. This emergency is being used as a chance to experiment with new forms of technology to understand how diseases spread. This is not the first time certain technologies like location data from call data records are being used to map people’s location, something extensively done during the Ebola crisis in Africa.

Across the world there are more and more discussions on why healthcare professionals need to lead the crisis response, and for Silicon Valley thinkers to take a step back. In this session the speakers spoke about the rise of surveillance technologies in India and the implications for privacy protection, while also looking at the effectiveness of these technologies.

Speakers:

1. Prof Subhashis Banerjee, Computer Science and Engineering Indian Institute of Technology Delhi.
2. Uttara Purandare , Phd scholar at Center for Policy studies, IIT Bombay
3. Sidharth Deb, Policy and Parliamentary Counsel, Internet Freedom Foundation

Date: Friday, 1st May, 2020
Time: 5:50 PM to 7:30 PM
Format: A discussion, with a presentation on Internet Freedom Foundation’s paper.

Who should participate:

Policy researchers, privacy engineers, academics working on/with evaluating covid technologies. Members of tech-policy advocacy organizations and journalists are welcome to join and ask questions

Missed the event?

Watch a recording of the preceedings on HasGeek TV, here!

In addition, follow the speakers on social media. Have questions? Reach out to us at editorial@hasgeek.com, or tweet to us at @HasGeek!

You can also go through the reading material for the session -

1. https://internetfreedom.in/a-comprehensive-look-at-covid-surveillance-and-privacy-in-india/
2. http://www.cps.iitb.ac.in/surveilling-the-virus/
3. http://www.cse.iitd.ac.in/~suban/reports/apps.pdf
4. https://cis-india.org/papers/ebola-a-big-data-disaster