Beware! The Big Boss is watching you

7 min readJun 6, 2018

Modi Government at the center is on lookout to ‘buy’ a new Social Media Analytics tool using your money to surveil you.

Believe what I say: Your data is my right

A lot of hue and cry was raised last month when it came to light that Facebook had allowed CA to access social media details of millions of users on its platform without informed consent. It also came to light that these data was then used to micro-target voters and influence their voting preferences. Already there have been allegations that it directly affected the outcomes of US presidential elections and Brexit. In fact, one of the whistleblower talked about its alleged role in Indian elections too — having worked with both national parties.

But while questions about the possible ramifications for data protection, privacy, consent and influence is being still debated, the Indian government aka Big Boss has already drawn up plans to put in place a Social Media Communications Hub that will “listen” to your social media engagements, gauge sentiments and serve you with a personalized campaign ad.

What does the Big Boss want?

The document has a pretty long list of demands. Few of them are shown above.

The tender document is very expansive in scope (and immensely intrusive if implemented). It seeks to acquire a social media analytical tool to mine data, analyze them and use predicative analysis to micro-target people. It also aims to use Natural language processing to gauge sentiments and categorize them as “positive, negative and neutral as viewed by Ministry of Information and Broadcasting”. We will look at some of highlights.

The document mentions, “The social media analytical tool should have comprehensive analytics system to monitor and analyze various aspects of social media communication and World Wide Web. The tool should have the capability to crawl World Wide Web and social media to monitor and analyze various trends emerging as well as to gauge the sentiments amongst netizens.”

Listening and responding capabilities to ‘listen’ to various digital channels and enable extensions to “integrate proprietary data sources like the mobile insights platform’’ in nine Indian languages and five foreign. It seeks to get inside your Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google platforms like Gmail, Play store etc., LinkedIn, blogs and many others. It willalso be able to “respond using their workflow mechanism” for seamless conversations. Though the document makes no mention of WhatsApp, it should be assumed that they are covered too (by virtue of being a part of Facebook). It must be noted here that while your WhatsApp chats are encrypted end-to-end, their backups aren’t. So, once they are on Google drive, they can be ‘read’, so to say.

Create a conversation archive of social media users and be able to see “historic conversation of each user in a reverse chronological manner along with the ability to merge conversations across channels”. In short, create your profile, from behavior data spread across different platforms.

Even your history needs to be looked into!!

Ability to use NLP for sentiment analysis. “The system should also allow for training based on custom dataset to provide for better accuracy with time”, the document mentions. It begets a question: what is the source of training dataset? How will they be collected? Is the data collection process transparent?

Real-time monitoring capability to prepare a list of influencers, customer and competitors among others.

Predictive analytics capabilities to suggest “headlines and breaking news of various channels and newspapers across the globe” and give an idea about their leanings, business deals, investors, their country policies, sentiment of their population, past trends etc. It also seeks to predict the impact of these headlines on people and how to utilize them to create a “positive perception” of the country and instill “nationalistic feeling”

Predicative analysis to push out news that instill “nationalistic feeling”

The document also demands that the tool should be able to “capture” the digital records in the form of emails and attachments, OCR documents and images. In short, everything. So, if you thought that it was only google that was reading your Gmail mails, wait for this one.

Questions remain in abundance

At a time when debate has been raging around the globe about the need for privacy and data protection in the digital world, the audacity to order a social media monitoring tool is nothing short of brazenness. Let there be no confusion that this is not an attempt at surveillance. Also, the consent part is crucial. The argument that since data has been shared by a user publicly and hence using publicly available data is okay also holds no water. The data was shared in particular context and any attempt to use that for their profiling is criminal.

Government and the PM don’t care about your consent. You need to look no further than NamoApp

Last August, a nine-judge Supreme Court bench had upheld that privacy is a fundamental right and cannot be tampered with, unless done so within the purview of law. Since, there is neither a law regarding data protection or privacy in India, any attempts to use even an algorithm to munch and crunch personal data is a contempt of court.

While, initially, the bid was open only to the Indian companies, it was reportedly revised to extend the offer to foreign companies too. The last date has been extended as well with one such extension coming last week. With each country having its own notion and regulation regarding data protection laws, it remains to be seen how the government is aiming to safeguard the data collected. The need for data localization has been clearly thrown out of the window.

Another interesting bit of information is about the total cost of the project. The tender document mentions that the interested bidder must furnish an EMD amount of ₹ 44,00,000. The EMD amount is usually kept at 1–5% of the total bid price. If the earnest deposit is itself at about 44 lakhs, one can only imagine the amount of money that is going to be invested in this useless and illegal enterprise. Some estimate it to be somewhere around 45 crores. It is also worth asking: who is going to fund it? The ruling party or the government? If it’s the government (which is more likely), then how can the use of taxpayers money be justified for a party’s election campaign?

If the EMD amount is itself ‘bout 50 lakhs, you can just imagine what the total cost gonna be. Question is who will bear the cost?

The move is a yet another attempt at muzzling the freedom of expression. Worse, it seeks to monitor what people do in their personal time. With no regards to law and political propriety, the present government is hell bent on using state power to influence and intimidate common people. It seeks to build an echo chamber where people think and say only what their masters want to hear. Take this opportunity to call them out. They have already decided on what you should eat, whom you should love and what you should say and watch.

Given the 1-year license period as “per scope of work”, it is clear that focus is on 2019 elections

And to the Bhakts who refuse to understand anything, here’s a short summary: The boss is trying to read your messages that you have sent to your girlfriend (or to someone who you have been stalking online). This impacts you too. So speak up.

The tender document can be read (and downloaded) here: http://www.becil.com/uploads/tender/TendernoticeBECIL01pdf-04836224e38fdb96422221c4e057f6c5.pdf

For ideas, principles and inputs about Privacy, visit this page: https://saveourprivacy.in/ They have put forth a model draft law Indian Privacy Code, 2018. Do check it once and pitch in with your views.

Edit: Attorney General stated before Supreme Court on 03rd August, 2018 that Government has withdrawn its proposal to put the hub in place. PIL filed by Mahua Moitra against the proposed hub has been sisposed.

Edit (05/09/2018): On August 3, the Centre withdrew its proposal of creating a Social Media Communication Hub, through which it wanted to monitor the social media accounts of citizens, after the Supreme Court called the plan an attempt at creating a “surveillance state”. But even before this plan of the government could come under public scrutiny, several of its agencies had been using a “strategic” tool that conducts mass surveillance of citizens’ social media activities, show documents reviewed by Scroll.in.

https://scroll.in/article/893015/40-government-departments-are-using-a-social-media-surveillance-tool-and-little-is-known-of-it

Beware! The Big Boss is watching you

Written by Akhilesh Kumar

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