On Kill Switches, Media Silence, and Governmental Super-Powers – A Comment on Vadodara

Posted on by Kartik Chawla

(Image Source: https://flic.kr/p/5V1h4R)

The following is a post on the recent disconnection of mobile internet, bulk SMS and bulk MMS services by the government in Vadodara in light of social unrest and riots. It’s a bit of a long post, and therefore has been divided into sections – the first part details the factual background of the issue, the second part contrasts it with Hong Kong, the third part considers the legal perspective, and the final two parts are my comments on it. My sincere thanks to Swaraj Paul Barooah for his helpful comments on the post.

Background

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The Right to Be Forgotten – An Explanation

Posted on by Veera Mahuli

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This is the first in a two-part post on the Right to be Forgotten. This post is part of our 101 series of posts, which seek to explain the issue at hand, and the next post shall address the issue and the debate surrounding it in more detail.

In 2010, a Spanish citizen filed a complaint against a Spanish newspaper, Google Spain and Google Inc. with the national Data Protection Agency. The complaint objected to an auctioned notice of his repossessed home that kept coming up on Google’s search results.  The proceedings against the petitioner had been fully resolved and he claimed the reference to the proceedings on Google to be entirely redundant and a violation of his privacy rights. The Spanish court referred the case to the Court of Justice of the European Union. 

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Law Commission Media Law Consultation – Panel I, Self Regulation v. Statutory Regulation

Posted on by Tech Law Forum @ NALSAR
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The following is a post by Shashank Singh, a third year student at NUJS, covering the first panel of the Law Commission’s ongoing Media Law Consultation, Self-Regulation v. Structural Regulation.  Shashank currently serves as Associate Editor for the  NUJS Law Review, and his areas of interest include Constitutional Law, Media Law and IPR. 

The Law Commission of India is currently hosting a two day consultation process on issues concerning media law. This comes in the backdrop of the TRAI’s Recommendations on Ownership of Media released on August 12, 2014. The first panel looked at the much debated topic of Self Regulation v. Structural Regulation. The consultation was attended by journalists, academics and students. Ironically, the notable absence in the entire consultation process were the ‘owners’ who would be most effected from the outcome of any future binding regulation.

This panel consisted of Justice R.V. Raveendran, N. Ram, Ravish Kumar and Vanita Kohli-Khandekar. The panel was moderated by S. Varadrajan.

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The Mirage of Internet Security: A Response to the Bash Bug

Posted on by Kartik Chawla

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Recently in our class on the Law of Evidence, the discussion turned to the security of email accounts, specifically Gmail. Our teacher asked a general question, about how easy it would be for a person to hack a Gmail account, on a scale of 0 (extremely difficult) to 5(extremely easy). There was a smattering of response, ranging between 0 to 1.5.

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Of Facebook and Privacy – Part I: The Constitutional and Tortuous Facets

Posted on by Tech Law Forum @ NALSAR

(Image Source: opensource.com, https://flic.kr/p/84VZAr)

The following post by Samyak Sibasish is the first in a series of posts analysing the effects of Social Media, specifically Facebook, on Privacy. This post focuses on the constitutional and tortuous dimensions of the issue, while the next one will focus on the contractual aspects of it. Samyak is a 3rd year student at NUJS, Kolkata. Apart from being interested in cricket and politics, he spends his time on reading on law and justice systems, more specifically caste. Additionally, being a social media freak, he likes to research on the curious myriad ways the world of social media interacts with the laws that govern it.

Of late, it has been confirmed by media that Facebook has seen a meteoric rise in its number of users over the past decade and if bracketed as a nation, it can be the fourth most populated nation in the world. It is but pertinent to examine how protected is users’ privacy on a social networking forum like Facebook.

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Data Retention Protocols: A Critical Appraisal of the Telecom Surveillance Apparatus in India and Abroad (Part II)

Posted on by Tech Law Forum @ NALSAR
The second post in the two-part series on Data Retention laws in India and abroad, by Balaji Subramanian. The first part can be found here.

In Foreign Lands: US and the EU

Earlier, I’ve given a broad picture of the data retention scenario in India. Now, I attempt to draw a comparison between India and other, more “advanced” jurisdictions such as the US and the EU.

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