New Delhi: On a day when Prime Minister Narendra Modi lauded technological innovations in India at the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, the Congress lashed out against the Union government for surreptitiously floating a tender that it alleges will infringe upon people’s privacy in an unprecedented manner.
Referring to a new ‘Request for Proposals’ by the Broadcast Engineering Consultants India Limited (BECIL), Congress spokesperson Abhishek Manu Singhvi said that BECIL, a Mini Ratna company, has invited a Rs 42-crore tender to buy software to monitor the 12 most popular social media platforms. “The scope of work as listed in the invitation clearly violates Article 19 of the constitution and various sections of the IT Act. The Modi government makes it clear to the people that Big Brother is watching you and it will always watch you.”
Here is what the tender mentions in its “scope of work”.
“A technology platform is needed to collect digital media chatter from all core social media platforms as well as digital platforms like news, blogs, and forums along with a proprietary mobile insights platform in a single system providing real time insights, metrics, and other valuable data. The platform will be deployed in the private data centre and will need to integrate with the mobile platform database for a seamless view across all data platforms.
Listening and responding capabilities: The platform is expected to not only listen to the standard digital channels listed below but also enable easy extension to integrate proprietary data sources like the mobile insights platform. The following need to be supported:
Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Google+, Instagram, Linkedin, Flickr, Tumblr, Pinterest, Play Store, email, News, Blogs, Forums, Complaint Websites.
Real time integration for Facebook and Twitter needs to be demonstrated. Also the platform will need to demonstrate the ability to configure data collection, actual data collection and insights, and response for the platform.
Conversation Archive: Ability to see historic conversation of each user in a reverse chronological manner along with the ability to merge conversations across channels.”
Singhvi said that the tender clearly asks that “the bidder is required to mine meta-data but it does not even minutely mention how it can’t be unencrypted. There is no mention of safeguards at all”.
“It is a mystery to us why the government, which itself had set up Srikrishna Committee for data protection and privacy, could not wait for its report to be submitted. It has gone ahead and floated the tender without keeping in mind the huge debate around privacy issues. It is still a mystery what the government will do with so much personal data or why at the first place such data was sought by the government,” he said, adding that the government was disregarding the Supreme Court ruling in which a nine-judge bench said that right to privacy was a fundamental right.
He cited the example of NaMo App which recently got flak for allegedly pumping private information of those who downloaded it and giving it to private sellers. He also said that recently, 13 lakh NCC cadets were asked to give out their personal information by the PMO when the prime minister had to address them online.
“At the same time,” he said, “a Chandigarh-based journalist who had exposed the easy ways by which Aadhar details could be sourced from local agents, merely by paying Rs 500, has to face an FIR from police”.
“This only shows the hypocrisy, insensitivity and duplicity of the Union government. It wants to intrude into every aspect of your privacy, your body, your home. The tender is one of the worst examples of using taxpayer money to snoop into the taxpayer’s life,” the senior Congress leader said.