Zoho, Censorship, and Privacy Concerns: Apar Gupta on India’s Digital Policies
India’s digital landscape is changing fast, and behind it lie big questions about privacy, data, and control.
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Government emails have now moved to Zoho. Twitter has just lost its case against the government over censorship and takedown orders. And there’s a new data protection law that is being seen by many as a tool for state surveillance rather than citizen protection.
India’s digital landscape is changing fast, and behind it lie big questions about privacy, data, and control. Apar Gupta, co-founder of the Internet Freedom Foundation, speaks to The Quint about the core shifts shaping the online ecosystem today.
He discusses the political interest behind the government’s push for Zoho, the security and privacy concerns around it, and how increasing online censorship is shaping people’s behaviour.
Edited excerpts from the interview below.
The Government of India's email service for around 1.2 million employees has moved to a platform developed by Zoho, and the Ministry of Education has told officials to use Zoho's office suite for official work under the spirit of the 'Swadeshi' movement. What explains this push? What are the security and privacy concerns around it?
This has an economic interest, this has a geopolitical interest, but this also has a political interest. The economic interest is the local growth of industry and jobs; geopolitical interest because platforms today are power as well. But I want to talk a little bit about the political interest here which I think is an underexplored area of where the government's motivations may be coming from.
This is a government which has an openly cultural nativist agenda around Hindu nationalism, and core to its central ideology is homogenising society and people's ways of living on the basis of what are they seeing on a day-to-day basis, what they are interacting on a day-to-day basis, and this all relies on information exchange.
In a digital society, it occurs through digital platforms like a messaging app. But Zoho's Arattai app does not have technical documentation, how it implements system security, what is its implementation of end-to-end encryption. If you look at the other alternatives, which are WhatsApp or Signal, they clearly disclose it alongside what kind of data they keep.
All you have on Zoho is the absence of technical documentation, and public statements on Twitter by its founder Sridhar Vembu, who keeps saying that please trust me, our business model is to keep your data safe, but these are assurances which cannot be verified.
This year, we have seen a lot of clampdown on online speech like takedown notices during Operation Sindoor to the controversy with Kunal Kamra, India's Got Latent, and of course, the YouTube copyright strikes. How do you see this pattern of increasing content regulation?
So I think the pattern of increasing content regulation comes from two or three larger factors. The first is that there has been a massive increase in the mobile teleconnectivity in India... A lot of people now rely on social media as well as electronic, any kind of digital media, much more deeply as they were doing earlier.
There is a real political interest for regulation, and there is also a social interest which is a streak of moral conservatism which is there in our society again comes from a Hindu nationalistic, casteist kind of view of society.
Now there may be real mental impacts due to the use of social media on a person's self-esteem etc. But this is not framed as it. It's framed as a demand for a censor board for the internet, and I think so between these two big forces, there is also some interest of national security, wanting to make sure that our neighbouring countries are not able to run influence operations and misinformation.
So when you have a political interest, a social conservatism interest, and a security interest, you will keep seeing movements towards the escalating use of existing laws for censorship as well as proposals for news laws.
This kind of censorship which is happening is instilling a level of fear in society. People self-censor a whole lot today because they worry not only about the legal consequences of what may happen, but they also fear social exclusion and targeting today.
Speaking about end-to-end encryption, I want to ask you how much do you think the average Indian cares about things like privacy, because when you look at something like DigiYatra, we know so many people who are more than happy to use it for convenience, keeping aside the privacy sort of questions that are in play.
I think a lot of people do use DigiYatra and are open to making a bargain or making that trade against their personal information for usability, for comfort, and that is something which needs to be offered on the basis of a right in which people have a continuing ability to demand that how their data is being used.
It is not as if privacy is an absolute, privacy means that you have a subsisting right in the personal identifiers related to your existence. There are certain fair terms under which businesses can access it, it needs to be linked to that business purpose, should not be exploited, and you should have a continuing level of control over it.
Now the problem with a deployment like DigiYatra was not that it was using facial recognition only, the problem with it was that people did not even know if it was mandatory or voluntary. The kind of sign-ups which were happening in which there were volunteers who were hired by the DigiYatra foundation. Should air travel and DigiYatra be restricted to people who only have smartphones?
There has been a high level of coercion in its deployment which is a documented fact, and this is what plagues all the digital deployments by the Indian government today. It is this level of coercion which is breaking trust, in addition to the kind of exclusion these technologies cause and then their lack of safeguards. There is alsp an impact on people due to increased levels of surveillance, which occur on people in terms of real world harms who are members of minorities.
In fact, the policing in India survey shows that people who are from the lower socio-economic strata of Indian society care about privacy more. People may not understand privacy as the Supreme Court may have articulated it—autonomy, dignity, liberty—but they feel it in their bones in the way they live on a daily basis.
Watch the full interview for more.