Information Policy

EU lawmakers take tough stance on independent data protection

By Jennifer Baker

The European Commission underlined its commitment to data protection on Wednesday by referring Hungary to the European Court of Justice (ECJ) over the independence, or lack of it, for its national data protection authority.

Under Hungary's new Constitution, which became law on Jan. 1, a new National Agency for Data Protection was set up to replace the former Data Protection Commissioner's Office. According to the Data Protection Directive, E.U. countries must establish a supervisory body, which acts in complete independence, to monitor the application of the directive. The independence of data protection authorities is also explicitly required by Article 16 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the E.U.

However, in setting up the new agency, Hungary prematurely ended the six-year term of the data protection commissioner, whose term of office was not due to finish until September 2014. The personal independence of such a data protection supervisor includes protection against removal from office, a key requirement of E.U. law.

According to the Commission, in removing the commissioner from his post two years and nine months earlier than required, Hungary violated the independence of the supervisory authority, which is why it decided to take the matter to the ECJ.

In 2010 the court ruled that the mere risk of political influence through state scrutiny is sufficient to hinder the independent performance of the supervisory authority's tasks.

A second case regarding the retirement age of judges, prosecutors and public notaries in Hungary was also referred to the ECJ on Wednesday.

http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/news/internet/3353829/eu-lawmakers-take-tough-stance-on-independent-data-protection/

Hungary mulls tax on phone calls, Internet use: website

Hungary is considering a new tax on phone calls and Internet usage which could yield up to 50 billion forints ($221.38 million) a year and would help plug budget holes, website Origo.hu reported on Friday, citing economy ministry sources.

Hungary, which is seeking a funding deal with the European Union and the International Monetary Fund, needs to prove to the EU that it can keep its deficit below the EU's ceiling of 3 percent of gross domestic product both this year and next.

The government is expected to finalize its fiscal plans and submit them to Brussels by the end of this month.

EU finance ministers in March suspended Hungary's access to half a billion euros in aid from 2013 for failing to keep its budget in check but told Budapest it could escape the sanctions if it takes remedial fiscal action by June.

Origo said the government would discuss the fiscal plans next Wednesday. It will have to plug a hole of 150 billion forints this year and around 400 billion next year.

Deficit-cutting measures could include a new tax on financial transactions already flagged by Economy Minister Gyorgy Matolcsy.

That new tax, which could bring between 100 billion and 250 billion forints into state coffers depending on which financial transactions would be affected, would come on top of further spending cuts at ministries and reductions in the drug subsidy budget, Origo.hu said.

The Economy Ministry was not immediately available to comment.

Last month Brussels said Hungary's deficit could hit 3.6 percent of GDP in 2013 if Budapest does not take new measures, from a target of 2.5 percent this year.

Hungary's government has promised to phase out taxes worth a combined 160 billion forints on telecoms, energy and retail companies next year and halve its big windfall tax on banks, which at about 200 billion forints a year is the highest in the EU. This revenue loss will have to be offset by the new measures.

($1 = 225.8541 Hungarian forints)

(Reporting by Krisztina Than)

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/20/net-us-hungary-budget-tax-idUSBRE83J0K220120420

India's skewed internet censorship debate

The current mechanisms of internet censorship in India  are draconian and unconstitutional. They need to be replaced with a new set of rules that are fair, transparent and accessible for public scrutiny, says Shivam Vij

Recent debates on internet censorship in India have focussed on the allegedly free-for-all nature of the internet. Those of us who have argued against internet censorship have been somewhat misrepresented as arguing for absolute freedom whereby the reasonable restrictions laid down in Article 19 (A) of the Constitution of India don't apply. Nothing could be farther than the truth.

It has been said that the internet can be used to incite violence, particularly inter-communal violence, and there needs to be a mechanism to prevent that. Communications Minister Kapil Sibal [ Images ] wants internet giants to "self-regulate" for this reason, denying that he wants to censor political dissent on the internet. On the heels of his expression of such concern in December 2011, Mufti Aijaz Arshad Qasmi and journalist Vinay Rai filed cases against various internet companies for similar material that is religiously offensive.

It needs to be pointed out, however, that the cases filed by Qasmi and Rai are under the Indian Penal Code and do not even invoke the Information Technology Act. So if the Indian Penal Code can be used against religiously offensive material, why do we need any new mechanism to "regulate" or even "self-regulate" the internet?

Since even before the internet became important enough for Indian courts, government departments and agencies to ask American internet companies to remove content, the government has had another mechanism in place: asking internet service providers or ISPs to block a webpage. They did so informally by blocking Dawn.com, website of the Pakistani newspaper Dawn, during the Kargil  war in 1999. They did so again to the webpage of a militant group in the northeast, on the website of the Yahoo! Groups mailing list service. And again in 2006, when they blocked over 20 websites, some of them for no apparent reason.

The process of blocking websites, a final decision for which is taken by the department of information technology in consultation with the home ministry, is so opaque that we don't even know which websites are blocked in India -- we can only trust that the DIT's responses to Right To Information applications are truthful. They refuse to reveal why a site was blocked --some of them are Hindutva wesbites, one asks for a separate Dalit nation-State, one is an American teenager's blog ranting against Islam, one is a cartoon porn site. No real porn is blocked, though. 

Imagine a situation when you don't even know of books or films that are banned -- the public cannot even debate the rights and wrongs of such censorship because we don't even know what is censored on the Indian web. We are in that situation and it beats me why we are not angry about it. Nevertheless, it makes you wonder: when the government has been blocking webpages it thinks are not suitable for Indians to view, why do we need new and additional laws or 'mechanisms' to tackle allegedly "offensive" material on the web?

Okay, so ISP-level blocking can be easily bypassed using "anonymiser" websites and software. That is not a problem for the Indian government either, as it has been informally asking big internet companies to remove content for years and, guess what, these companies have been complying. To give but one example, on February 15, 2011, Dalit groups in Mumbai [ Images ] protested against a Facebook page titled 'I Hate Ambedkar'. A group of around 400-500 people pelted stones and burnt tyres. By evening the police had acquired an order from a magistrate's court in Bandra to ask Facebook to removed a defaced photo of B R Ambedkar from the page, and also that the page be blocked in India. As I read news reports of the protest that night, sitting in Delhi  I tried to find the Facebook page in question. It had already been taken off or blocked or both.

There were many such cases of allegedly defamatory or inflammatory content in Orkut in Maharashtra in 2006-07, involving, unsurprisingly, Bal Thackeray , Chhatrapati Shivaji and Ambedkar. This resulted in Maharashtra police's cyber crime cell establishing a hotline with Orkut whereby the latter promised to "block those 'forums' and 'communities' that contain 'defamatory or inflammatory content' but also provide the IP addresses from which such content has been generated," according to a report in the Economic Times.

So the government tells Google or Facebook to remove something and they comply. In fact, Facebook has been known to be less concerned over its users' rights and though it is not transparent enough to tell us how much of our content they have removed, Facebook definitely does so. Google even admits to it. Google's international Transparency Report tells us that in the years 2010 alone, various Indian government departments and representatives asked them to remove 640 pieces of content of which Google removed more than one-third.

Shocking as it sounds, this has been happening for some years now, and not only in Maharashtra but across India. Any representative of the Indian government writes to Google to remove, say, a YouTube video, and they may comply with it, and even the person who created/uploaded that video doesn't know that the government got it removed! We don't know what these pieces of removed content are, so we can't debate whether in those cases the Indian Constitution's Fundamental Right to free speech was violated or whether its reasonable restrictions prevailed in letter and spirit. Nevertheless, it still brings us to the question: if the government already has had such mechanisms in place, why do we need new rules and regulations? 

Nobody can disagree that popular social networking websites are often used to defame, abuse or threaten people. We have all seen that on the internet. However, not only does the Indian government and law have enough ways to deal with it -- as showed above -- it is also not the case that these internet companies do not exercise "self-regulation". All major social networking sites give users options to report content that is offensive, amounts to hate speech, incites violence, is pornographic and so on. While reporting such, you are often asked to cite the reason.

 

On Facebook, you can block another user from seeing you or being seen by you, and even report such a user for harassment. If enough people report a piece of content, it is often taken down. On Twitter, for instance, accounts that spam, impersonate, abuse or harass can be "reported for spam". Often, Twitter users are seen requesting their followers to en masse report an account for spam and Twitter acts on it. All of these sites are particularly quick in removing pornographic content.

A post in Google's official blog on March 10 explained that while Google is committed to free speech, it does recognise its limits and regularly removes content. The post said, 'For products like Blogger, Orkut, Google+ and YouTube -- where we host the content -- we encourage users to express themselves freely, but we also want to ensure that people behave responsibly, so we set guidelines covering the use of our different services. For example, no hate speech, no copyright-infringing content, no death threats, no incitement to violence. And when we're notified about content that either violates those guidelines or breaks the law -- for example, we receive a court order -- we will remove it, or restrict it in the country where it's illegal. Earlier this year, for example, we removed a number of specific webpages from Google properties in Indiaafter a court ruled that they violated Indian law.'

Clearly, even Google is no heaven for libertarians who'd say no to any and every form of censorship. The debate on internet censorship in India is hinged on several straw men, the lack of "self-regulation" being one of them. We must question the bogey of self-regulation with the simple fact that self-regulation already exists on the internet. Which will lead us again to the question: if we have laws, direct hotlines, ISP-level blocking and even "self-regulation," why do we need new and addition rules and regulations? 

The answer lies in the 2/3rd items Google did *not* remove, as it felt they did not violate Indian law or its own terms of service. There's a small, rare detail that the Google Transparency Report for January-June 2011 revealed: 'We received requests from different law enforcement agencies to remove a blog and YouTube videos that were critical of chief ministers and senior officials of different states. We did not comply with these requests.' That is what it is really about: political dissent.

It's a pity we can't know who these chief ministers and senior officials were and which YouTube videos they wanted removed. We can't really make Google tell us that. We did not elect the people who decide such policies at Google and neither do we pay Google for its services we use. We did elect our chief ministers, though, and we do pay taxes that give our bureaucrats and elected leaders salaries, and we do have the right to know thanks to a democratic Constitution. Is it too much to ask for?

On December 5, 2011, the New York Times' India Ink blog revealed that Communications Minister Kapil Sibal had summoned executives of internet companies including Facebook and Google to his office and asked them to remove some content and come up with an impossible system of "pre-screening" all content and not allowing what was 'unacceptable'. The only content the story revealed was a Facebook page that allegedly maligned Congress party president Sonia Gandhi [ Images ], saying it was "unacceptable". He later denied he asked for "pre-screening" but then he also denies any intent of censorship.

A week later, Outlook magazine printed some of the pictures Sibal found offensive -- they were photoshopped caricatures of the Congress president and of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh [ Images ] that lampooned them for corruption. These images were widely used as large posters in the Anna Hazare-led Jan Lokpal movement. Sibal in his press conference the next day said it was all about religiously offensive content. Vinay Rai, who gave samples of such religiously offensive material to the Delhi high court, told me that he got some of his employees at the newspaper he runs to find such images online.

In late December, the Maharashtra police requested a domain registrar, Big Rock, an Indian company, to simply delete the domain name www.cartoonsagainstcorruption.com, run by cartoonist Aseem Trivedi.

In April 2011 the communications ministry notified rules to the Information Technology (Amendment) Act of 2008, which provided a whole mechanism of internet censorship without involving the government at all. The rules encourages anyone to send a content removal notice to any "intermediary" (website, domain registrar, blog owner and so on) asking to remove content within 36 hours. You can do so for content you find derogatory or blasphemous but also if you find anything "disparaging" or "obscene".

An intermediary can choose not to comply, only at the risk of legal action. The complainant can file an FIR or approach the courts. The Centre for Internet and Society, Bengaluru , tested these rules. It sent such a notice to seven websites. Six of them complied rather than face legal action. Independent bloggers or big internet companies, nobody wants to waste time and money on litigation. In one case, CIS had asked for just a comment on an article to be removed. They removed the whole article and all the comments!

Such large-scale private censorship results in what are known as "chilling effects". It is these rules that Big Rock used to justify removing www.cartoonsagainstcorruption.com without notifying its owner, Aseem Trivedi in advance, leave alone giving him an opportunity to defend his content.

Nobody is arguing for a free-for-all internet space where Indian laws don't apply. All we are asking is for Indian law to prevail on the internet and grants us our constitutional right to free speech with "reasonable" restrictions. The current mechanisms of internet censorship in India -- blocking, direct removal requests to websites, intermediary rules -- are draconian and unconstitutional. They need to be replaced with a new set of rules that are fair, transparent and accessible for public scrutiny. They should not be amenable to misuse by the powers-that-be for their own private interests.

Why internet/GDP ratios make no sense

By Felix Salmon

On Monday, the Economist reprinted a chart from a BCG report, which purported to show the contribution of “the internet” to the total GDP of various different countries. Britain comes out on top, with an internet-to-GDP ratio of 8.3%; it’s followed by Korea, China, Japan, USA, India, and Australia. After the UK, the highest-ranking European country is Germany, on just 3.3%, while Canada lags far behind the US.

All of this was rather puzzling to me, so I spoke to BCG’s Paul Zwillenberg, one of the authors of the report. And the main thing I wanted to know, of course, was how on earth you could turn “the internet” into an annual dollar amount divisible by national GDP.

“It’s like electricity. It’s part and parcel of the fabric of daily life,” Zwillenberg said, almost before I could ask my question. “It’s touching every part of the economy.” I’m inclined to agree — but you’d never dream of measuring different countries’ electricity-to-GDP ratios. So what’s he doing here?

Zwillenberg did say that in ten years or so, “you won’t need to measure the internet economy because it will be totally pervasive”. But for the time being, he’s determined to measure the internet. And the way he’s doing it is very web 1.0.

Remember the dot-com boom of the 1990s, when everybody got excited about the internet because it was a new way to buy stuff? That’s basically what BCG is measuring here. They’re taking total consumer expenditure in each country, and working out how much of that expenditure is online. As in, buying a hardback from Amazon, or a Beanie Baby from eBay. Then they add in the amount you pay your ISP to get online each month. And then they add a certain amount for investment by private enterprise in internet infrastructure, and a bit more for what they call “net exports” — the Czech Republic, for instance, apparently has a big internet security software sector.

The exports bit helps to explain why Canada’s number is low: a lot of Canadians, for obvious reasons, like to buy things on Amazon and other U.S.-based e-commerce sites. And every time they do, under BCG’s methodology, the Canadian internet economy is decreased by that amount. (It’s an export of the U.S., and an import of Canada, and the calculations add up net, rather than gross, exports.) As a result, it’s theoretically possible, in BCG World, for the internet to account for a negative proportion of GDP, in some countries.

But more generally, it seems to me that BCG’s not really measuring the internet here — it’s not measuring the hours spent watching YouTube, or interacting with friends on Facebook and Tumblr, or spreading news on Twitter, or even checking your stock portfolio or updating your billing information somewhere. It’s measuring e-commerce, primarily, which is an interesting subset of the internet, and one of the oldest, but ultimately just a fraction of what it can be.

And when you’re measuring e-commerce, you’re measuring lots of things which aren’t really internet-related at all. For instance, e-commerce is naturally going to be more common in countries with a reliable postal service; in countries where gasoline prices are very high (because the cost of gasoline is a hidden tax on shopping in real life); and in countries where the cost of retail property is very high. The UK, of course, scores very highly on all those counts, while the U.S. doesn’t. But what those things say about the internet’s contribution to the economy as a whole is, I think, limited.

On May 17, if Alexia Tsotsis is to be believed, Facebook is going to go public, and might well find itself with a $100 billion valuation. Almost none of that valuation can be seen in the kind of things that BCG is measuring. So let’s not get too carried away with the idea that it’s easy to quantify the degree to which countries are diverging in terms of digital uptake. It isn’t. And the BCG methodology really isn’t a step in that direction.

http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2012/04/19/why-internetgdp-ratios-make-no-sense/

Survey: Most Czech teenagers were cyber-bullied

Olomouc, North Moravia, April 26 (CTK) - More than a half of Czech teenagers (56.5 percent) were victims of cyber-bullying, according to a survey conducted by Palacky University in Olomouc, the project's head Veronika Krejci said Thursday.

The survey was conducted on 10,830 children aged from 11 to 17 in late 2011.

Krejci, from the university's Centre of prevention of risk virtual communication, said the situation has slightly improved as the 2010 survey showed that 59.4 percent of Czech teenagers then said they were cyber bullied.

"A very slight improvement can be seen. Children already have better information and take more care," Krejci said.

The survey was now conducted for the third time.

Children were most often humiliated, offended and ridiculed. Three out of ten were victim of such cyber-bullying, said Eva Votrubova, spokeswoman for a Czech campaign on electronic safety.

Cyber-bullying was most often reported on social networks (40.5 percent), SMS messages (27.7 percent) and ICQ or Skype (24.4 percent).

One out of ten of the teenagers admitted they committed cyber-bullying.

One out of six said they would never tell their parents if they were victims of cyber-bullying.

Krejci said cyber-bullying may be worse than standard bullying.

"The victim often does not know who is the attacker, against whom to defend and how," she said.

She added that cyber-bullying can be viewed by thousands of persons on the Internet and stopping it may be impossible.

Krejci said children should not post their personal data on the Internet, especially not their photos, and they and their parents should be aware of the risks of electronic communication.

She said cyber-bullying may be preceded by bullying in real life, and sometimes victims of real-life bullying become cyber-bullies.

http://praguemonitor.com/2012/04/27/survey-most-czech-teenagers-were-cyber-bullied