Facebook should be answerable to Governments as the technology giant can fundamentally alter the course of public discourse not just through its own network but through other assets like messaging application WhatsApp and photo-sharing application Instagram. These are all powerful tools to build organisation and opposition but can also be used to silence dissent or manufacture violence. The safe harbour provisions under which such technology companies have escaped sanction for many years cannot be allowed to continue unchallenged. The likes of Facebook and Google are not just technology companies, they are media companies, too, and should be subjected to similar laws. Technologies like deepfake videos, where even a few photographs can be used to manufacture a video showing a personality spouting opinions far from his/her real stand, can potentially alter the course of a democracy. Think of this as the new terrorist attack before an election. By the time any rectification takes place, often due to delays, the damage has been done.

We agree that it is impossible to keep a check on every single user at every single point of time. However, it is also true that technologies are being developed to be able to quickly find potential hateful content. That said, it is important to haul these companies under the Central Government and on that front, Facebook India does have a point in refusing to appear before the Delhi Government’s Peace and Harmony Committee. The company is currently being hauled over the coals in a parliamentary committee, not just in India but in several countries across the world as Governments realise that its power needs to be kept in check for the growth of democracy. This includes the United Kingdom and the United States. Indeed, we wish the parliamentary committee hearings in India were streamed live for the public to observe and decide for themselves. Tech majors can do more themselves. For example, they should work a lot closer with traditional media companies as well as develop technologies that can easily detect videos that promote hate as well as those where users threaten self-harm. Facebook should not be allowed to escape with impunity but making it answerable to multiple agencies will serve little purpose either. Indeed that could actually delay meaningful reform.  

(Courtesy: The Pioneer)

Now that most of us are becoming video-conferencing experts, innovating on every call with a new virtual background, while also ordering groceries online and keeping an eye on the latest news updates popping up on our phone and computer screen, will it be too early to crystal gaze into a not-so-distant future, say 2021? Yes, it may be too early to call  2020  a “gap year”, specially when each new day has its own set of surprises. But there is no harm in peeping a little into next year’s trends. First, there is no escaping the fact that technology will tremendously impact the way we live, work, exercise, eat or buy next year, too. If the pandemic has thrown us into an ocean of uncertainties, if we look around carefully, it is an ocean of data. Those that learn to swim through pretty quickly and get a raft or something to latch on to will soon realise the potential of this ocean of opportunities. It has already started happening but a new technology called Artificial Intelligence (AI) will take over most of what is today relegated to a digital world.

To start with, algorithms would be put to use for early detection or even prediction of pandemics, assessment and even solutions for traffic patterns in a city, incremental/severe weather forecasts, healthcare, care for the most vulnerable and so on. But soon, like everything else, it will be all-pervasive in every little life decision. I am not sticking my neck out to say it will happen by next year but events of 2020 have hugely accelerated the human civilisation’s race towards finding an alternative to its own organic intelligent brains. The world is already flush with examples on how AI will have multiples of applications from that which is already available across the web. In short, we are on the verge of entering a new technological era which is predictive, sophisticated and has an eerie inorganic intelligence almost running into infinity (it is not enough to cut the cord and think that an AI system has switched off; remember there are thousands of machines crunching data points from multiple sources to predict  simple buying behaviour). This will definitely have a deep impact on the human race.

Next will come an age of extreme speeds of data access over the air or 5G. The world would have already been piloting cutting- edge 5G or fifth-generation mobile technology across large geographies and would have been near phase-wise national rollouts, had the pandemic not hit. India definitely has lost a year in the 5G race. However, the protocols and network vendor partner solutions may have been made more secure as a result of the delay.

In fact, 5G is likely to see the first level of deployment in urban areas (where the revenues are) and besides helping you download (at say five times the speeds of your current streaming action) social media videos/your favourite films and cricket matches, will also prove to be a great tool for remote and risky jobs. If some of the arterial sewer lines in a city are fitted with 5G chips, there could be a possibility of completely eradicating the need for human intervention in maintenance of a city’s drainage system. If the data coming in and also fed into the chips are analysed at the back-end by smart machines (think AI), who, then takes decisions to deploy little machine worms into the sludge to clean a choke or fix a leakage or even defuse a toxic gas emission, it would mean saving a few thousand precious lives each year. Together with this will come the ultra-smart homes (the protocols for which are already in advanced stages of negotiation by big tech companies) where perhaps your cooking burner will decide the menu and your bar may order itself a few of your favorite wines in case you aren’t stocked for the weekend. While robotic surgeries performed over the network specially for remote terrains (read rural) are already happening outside India, a self-driving car in Chandni Chowk may be further away.

Now that the all-pervasive technology has started to co-exist with us in our altered carbon realities, the threats to humanity will also increase. These threats would be increasingly cyber and 2021 will likely see more cyber security attacks (small, big, macro) than all of these years of digital revolution put together. The tell-tale volumes of these cyber security attacks (think SIM cloning, phishing attacks, stealing of bank passwords and OTPs) are already giving consumers and lawmakers a nightmare with increased adoption of the digital world during these work from home times. Think of the manifold increase of these forces as the technology world starts getting more complex with evolving protocols and appendages. You are more likely to hear the word cyber security in almost every important public forum and ministerial dialogues than you have ever heard in your life. Along with these, and one can only wish, multilateral solutions to tackling emerging threats will also emerge, which prevent anti-State forces from manipulating users of emerging technology. There will be new policy regimes, language and grammar for embracing these brave new islands we are heading towards, but let’s keep those for a later piece.                

 (The writer is a policy analyst)

In the new digital era, where data is growing at an unprecedented rate by the second and where organisations are quickly becoming data-first, one thing has become crystal clear. That the “this is good enough” approach by businesses, across the globe and in India, is no more acceptable when it comes to safeguarding the most precious capital, i.e. data, from an external intrusion. Ever since businesses have become increasingly dependent on their data to fuel innovation, drive new revenue streams and so on, Information Technology decision-makers have not just been evaluating their current data protection preparedness but have also been ramping up their investments in this regard.

However, over the past few months, since organisations have been fixated on quickly transitioning towards remote working due to the Coronavirus pandemic, they might have missed out on something vital that they should have been focussing on and that is the threats that come along with this work culture. As a result, the world and India with it, has been witnessing a steady uptick in the instances of cyber attacks.

For example, as per a recent report, India witnessed a 37 per cent increase in cyber attacks in the first quarter of this year as compared to the last quarter of 2019. The data also show that India now ranks 27th globally in the number of web-threats detected in the first quarter of this year as compared to when it ranked on the 32nd position globally in the fourth quarter of 2019. India also ranks 11th worldwide in the number of attacks caused by servers that were hosted in the country, which accounts for 22,99,682 incidents in the first quarter of this year as compared to 8,54,782 incidents detected in the fourth quarter of 2019, says the Kaspersky Security Network report.

Another report claims that data of over 21,000 Indian students, including their Aadhaar cards, photos and so on, have been put on sale on the Dark Web. Another instance of data being leaked on the Dark Web came to light in June, with a massive data packet — nearly 100 gigabytes in size — being put up for sale. The data comprises scanned identity documents of over one lakh Indians, including passports, PAN cards, Aadhaar cards, voter IDs and driver’s licences. Thus, given the rising data security concerns and incidents, chief technology officers (CTOs) need to look for a holistic approach towards data protection and management. Now, they need to be cognisant about how to respond, recover and learn in case a cyber intrusion occurs. Here are a few tips for CTOs that will help them redefine their data protection strategy.

Drift away from security to resilience: With the evolving nature of cyber attacks, it’s time for businesses to stop reacting and start anticipating. Loss of critical data has the power to not just cripple a company in no time but also damage its reputation for the long-term. Hence, instead of relying on traditional methods of data security i.e. identify, protect, detect, respond and then recover, organisations must imbibe state-of-the-art resilience strategies i.e. learn, respond, monitor and anticipate.

Adopt a security strategy ingrained in product mindset: Businesses must not only think about making security intrinsic to technology infrastructure but also aim at enabling security professionals become intrinsic to future product development. They need to transform into a data-first and product-first mindset organisation in order to be able to remain competitive in the future. Thus, instead of thinking of security as a prevention tool, the need of the hour is to incorporate it into the product design from the beginning so that it will make the architect systems and processes impenetrable.

The key to a winning strike is the right digital partner: In the past, businesses have been using a hit and trial method with regard to choosing their digital partner and this approach has brought in more vulnerability to their sensitive data assets. As per a report by Vanson Bourne, organisations in the Asia Pacific and Japan, which were relying on more than one data protection solution provider, were almost four times more vulnerable to a cyber incident that prevents access to their data. Hence, in order to combat the external threats, businesses must choose a single technology partner that delivers multi-platform security.

While it is critical to invest in the right technologies, it has also become utmost important for businesses to ramp up their education and awareness levels to stay abreast with new security threats. Therefore, to end the constant tussle between finding the right data protection architecture and keeping up with the modern security approaches, CTOs must focus on strategies that redefine their data protection ecosystems from time to time.

(The writer is Director and General Manager, Data Protection Solutions, Dell Technologies)

Hitting a wall in China, the social media giant has played panderer to deepen its market in India

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg had once said that opinions aired on social media do not shape people’s choices, their lived experiences under a particular political regime do. Since then, much water has flown under the bridge and social media has not only been used as a propaganda tool but has been weaponised to create a wave of opinion and manipulate public perception. Russia was first accused of data mining, hacking and using details to influence the US election. After that, social media became such a powerful barometer of discourse that willy-nilly it has become a partisan tool. So it comes as no surprise that an article published in The Wall Street Journal on Friday stated how Facebook India “took no action after BJP politicians posted content, accusing Muslims of intentionally spreading the Coronavirus, plotting against the nation and waging a ‘love jihad’ campaign by seeking to marry Hindu women.” The report quoted a former Facebook employee as saying that Facebook India was told not to filter extreme Right-wing messages by BJP leaders as that would be inimical to its business in India. This is a serious allegation as it makes Facebook equally guilty of differential standards when it comes to hate speech and blots its claimed ethics of being an accessible platform for all kinds of issues. Worse, it makes Facebook look like a panderer of the establishment, more interested in holding on to its Indian market with 290 million users and another 400 million on Whatsapp. With China erecting a wall against Western platforms, the corporation looks desperate to consolidate its presence in India. But as usual, this concern, despite a series of denials by the company, got buried in the competitive whataboutery of political parties. As Congress leader Rahul Gandhi claimed vindication, BJP leader and Union Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad reminded him how the Congress itself had harvested data in alliance with Cambridge Analytica before the Lok Sabha elections. Many Opposition parties, too, had accused Facebook of being the BJP’s de facto campaign manager before the Lok Sabha polls.

The larger question is, therefore, can social media ever again claim to be an open platform of free-flowing speech and ideas, considering it has gotten deeply embedded in all aspects of our life and cannot but be an influencer in itself? Facebook and Twitter are two corporate giants who can wield information as power, with the former having snapped up rivals Instagram and WhatsApp in recent years. With over 2.3 billion monthly users across its networks, it is too much of a behemoth to be democratic. Some estimates say that internet users spend an average of two hours and 22 minutes a day on such platforms, giving political parties the power to harness the numbers and attention span to disseminate their ideologies and even dump them indiscriminately, picking up some stray attention, too, in the process. US President Donald Trump was calculated to have utilised Twitter for an estimated $2.2 billion of free media coverage. Even newer political leaders from the opposite end of the political spectrum have captured popular imagination because of their online presence. For the corporations themselves, they are not non-profit and will, in the end, look out for their revenue graphs than the greater good. And, therefore, are into a lot of self-serving governance protocols in the absence of a public propriety code. In fact, Nick Clegg, Facebook’s VP of Global Affairs and Communications, had commented last year that “we don’t believe … that it’s an appropriate role for us to referee political debates and prevent a politician’s speech from reaching its audience and being subject to public debate and scrutiny.” The problem with this uninvolved approach is that politicians are emboldened to do whatever it takes to get their viewpoint across, even lies. Because there is no fact-checking, a campaign can go viral  — sometimes tidal — before it can be called out. Any rejoinder or retraction then seems rather pointless. Besides who would prevent mainline politicians from lying about their own data, which they quote citing their own statistical sources? No wonder the misinformation has catastrophic consequences though stakeholders benefit in their limited domain. There’s undoubtedly a need for a middle ground than a mutually self-serving club of the information propagator and the disseminator. Also such is their combined monopoly that while Facebook made money from paid political advertisements in the last US elections, Twitter capitalised on the anti-Facebook rant and banned such campaigns, drawing the alternative traffic to itself. Either way, both parties are capitalising on their database, a heaving monster that is beyond anybody’s control, and apportioning it between themselves. And users continue to be a captive audience.

Courtesy: Editorial-The Pioneer

Perovskite-based solar cells are a good alternative to silicon-based PV cells. But the problem of degradation due to weather conditions needs to be addressed

Recently, the Prime Minister inaugurated the country’s largest photovoltaic (PV) cell-based solar energy plant at Rewa in Madhya Pradesh. While inaugurating this 750 megawatt (MW) plant, he stressed upon the need for atmanirbharta (self-reliance). Considering that about 80 per cent of our solar power generation equipment is of Chinese origin, the inauguration of the solar plant was timely. The Prime Minister used the occasion to emphasise this aspect. Said he, “India won’t be able to fully use its solar power potential if the country doesn’t develop better solar panels, batteries and storage manufacturing capacity.” India imported $2.16 billion worth of solar photovoltaic cells, panels and modules in 2018-19.

India is lucky that sunlight is available in abundance here but the challenge lies in the procurement of the PV cells. This has been one of the major constraining factors in our efforts to realise the full potential of solar energy. According to a report submitted by the parliamentary Standing Committee, in order to achieve the target of 100 GW of solar electricity capacity by 2022, India should have had an installed capacity of 32,000 MW by 2017-18. But as of January 31, 2018, the country only had a capacity of 18,455 MW. As per the standing committee, the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy has to install the remaining 81,545 MW in just four years — this is over 20,000 MW a year and appears difficult to achieve.

However, despite the constraints, the price of solar energy has come down to Rs 2-2.50 per unit from Rs 7-8 per unit in 2014. A serious lacuna in this entire exercise of achieving the solar power target continues to be our poor record of indigenous manufacturing of solar panels and our near-complete dependency on Chinese imports.

Today, China is the only country that caters to most of the global PV cell demands. It produces the cheapest solar panels. It is difficult for any country to match such low prices. This has led to a situation where China has a virtual monopoly and this may not be desirable in the long run. Our own imports, mostly from China, accounted for 90 per cent of 2017 sales, up from 86 per cent in 2014. Thus, it is paradoxical that both our sources of energy, oil as well as solar, are currently heavily dependent on imports.

The Chinese advantage is based on low cost of manufacturing despite the process being highly power consumptive and polluting. In the present scenario, particularly in the wake of the Galwan incident, imports of solar technology from China have been banned as it would not have been logical on our part to continue to nourish their economy.

In the absence of cheap imports, the current situation may, perhaps, appear to be disappointing but there are alternatives which must be fully exploited. First, the solar thermal route for harnessing solar energy has found limited application so far. As of now, there are only six functional solar thermal plants, which amount to just a fraction of our total requirement.

Understandably, this technology has its own advantages but is somewhat more expensive than the PV cell route. This is why it has not gathered much acceptance. More research in this area can ensure that costs are further cut down leading to profitability.

An alternative to silicon-based PV cells, which is the speciality of China, has since been found in the form of Perovskite solar cells. This is also a tried and tested method. According to the work done at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bengaluru, the efficiency of the Perovskite cells, which was about three per cent in 2006, showed a marked improvement. It has now been determined to be at about 22 per cent, which makes it quite viable.

Perovskite is a crystalline form of the chemical called calcium titanate. It may sound formidable but fortunately, all the raw materials used to manufacture it are indigenously available. The process, too, is much simpler, less polluting and consumes less power than the production of silicon chips.

Perovskite is the product of limestone, which is abundantly available in the country, and titanium oxide, which is obtained from sands containing ilmenite, an ore of titanium. Ilmenite, too, is available in abundance as we have reserves of several million tonnes of this ore in the sands along the shores of Andhra Pradesh, Odisha, Tamil Nadu and Kerala.

The present usage of titanium oxide is confined to the paints and pigment industry as well as in the manufacture of cosmetics and sunscreens as it offers good protection against UV rays.

The absence of Chinese products from now onwards needs to be considered as an opportunity for accelerated research so as to put this technology to commercial use at the earliest. Perovskite-based solar cells have performed exceedingly well in controlled conditions but the problem of degradation due to weather conditions needs to be addressed. The silicon-based PV cells are almost weather proof, so the durability of Perovskite has to be brought up to that level.

Perovskite technology has the potential of being a game -changer in our quest for harnessing solar energy with less polluting and low cost solutions. The renewable energy firm, ReNew Power Pvt Ltd, has already announced that it is in discussion with various States to set up a Rs 1,500-2,000 crore facility to make solar cells and modules. The need is for close monitoring and allocation of sufficient funds for research. India can’t afford to lose the new solar race.

Writer: KK PAUL; Courtesy: The Pioneer

(The writer is a former Governor and senior advisor at the Pranab Mukherjee Foundation)