: Indian citizen data on Har Ghar Tiranga website raises privacy concerns #IndiaNEWS #India Hyderabad: This Independence Day, when millions of Indians went up on their roofs to fly the tricolour as

Indian citizen data on Har Ghar Tiranga website raises privacy concerns #IndiaNEWS #India
Hyderabad: This Independence Day, when millions of Indians went up on their roofs to fly the tricolour as part of the Central government’s Har Ghar Tiranga programme, were they waving their private data as well from the rooftop for data sharks to gobble up?
A now viral report by Srishti Jaswal published by the international nonprofit journalism organization, Rest of World, quotes digital rights activists saying that the voter outreach programme of the Bharatiya Janata Party, discussed first during the BJP meeting in Hyderabad in July, was actually a scheme in disguise to collect citizens’ data, which could now be misused by private firms looking to commercialise personal data.
The report says after the programme, which whipped up quite a nationalistic frenzy courtesy the aggressive social media campaigns by the BJP’s IT wings, by August 15, nearly 60 million Indian citizens had uploaded their photos with the national flag on the website, harghartiranga. com, with about 50 million of them geotagging the locations of their houses with their photos, apart from sharing their phone numbers to register on the portal.

Exclusive: Remember Har Ghar Tiranga certificates overflowing your screens? Nearly 50 million Indians ignored privacy concerns under pretext of nationalism and willingly geotagged themselves on a private website t. co/reCj96YRqx after Modis appeal. t. co/UGNoA8KACT
— Srishti (@seekingsrishti) September 15, 2022

The report says when the idea of the programme was first discussed at the BJP meeting in Hyderabad, BJP leader Vasundhara Raje had said that the party hoped to reach 200 million people through the campaign. On July 6, the Ministry of Culture was appointed as the nodal body for its implementation, and, in the following weeks, the government aggressively publicised the programme, including through changing Indian cellphone caller tunes on August 15 to a message asking people to upload photos, the report says, going on to quote Free Software Movement of India researcher Srinivas Kodali that no country had ever executed such a massive scale of geotagging of its own citizens.
“Previously, some fragmented attempts have been made to geotag citizens with an intention of digital commerce; however, not at this scale with an intention of electioneering,??? he says, adding that the photographs, many of which were uploaded along with location information, were still publicly available on the website.
“While the location information is not publicly available, it is retained by the website, which could lead to theft, hacking, and stalking. When siloed information, such as phone numbers, photographs, and location, is processed with other data sets, such as constituency population and voter preferences, it can make citizens vulnerable to ‘geo-propaganda’,??? Kodali is quoted saying.