Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) 2020: Why the draft is being opposed in India?
Publisher
Global Views 360
Publication Date
August 10, 2020
URL
Representative image for environmental destruction | Source: Aryan Singh via Unsplash
The Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC) sent a shockwave through the country when it released the Environmental Impact Assessment 2020 draft notification on March 12, 2020, amending the 2006 version.
The EIA serves as a means for the industries to obtain environmental clearances for their projects. The proposed projects are brought in front of the concerned public to be discussed and debated. If the projects proposed by the industries disturb the ecology and people living in that particular area to a large extent, then the Government cannot give permission for the project to continue.
There are several things included, or excluded, in the 2020 version which have enraged environmentalists, nature lovers and numerous concerned citizens across India.
Firstly, it includes post-facto approval. This means that any factory which has already begun with construction, will get a clearance, irrespective of the environmental damage it has already caused. However, the owners of the concerned factory will have to pay a fine of a certain amount.
Secondly, the new draft notification is released only in Hindi and English. Considering the lingual diversity of India, the communities which are not fluent in either languages will not know what the notification is about. This will reduce transparency and the livelihoods of such communities might get demolished without any warning.
The 2006 notification made it mandatory for every company involved in a project to submit a report every six months, verifying that the company is working within the terms of the granted permission and not going overboard with the available resources. The 2020 draft has extended the timeline of report submission once in twelve months. Moreover, certain projects like expansion of highways and road construction through forests are exempted from getting clearances.
Himalayan foothills, Sikkim, India | Source: Flowcomm via Flickr
Such features of the 2020 draft violate norms of the Environmental Protection Act (EPA, 1986) and also indicate that the scales are tipping dangerously towards the big industries, at the cost of our planet’s health. Livid cries have erupted from the people, especially those living in North-Eastern India and foothills of the Himalayas.
Himalayan ecology is at the brink of fragility and it requires stringent monitoring laws, the opposite of what EIA 2020 offers. "The Himalayan region today is in the most vulnerable position with massive climate-induced disasters, increasing deforestation, loss of biodiversity etc. Amending environmental norms will accelerate the ecological crisis in the Himalayas" saysRavi Chopra, a renowned environmentalist from Dehradun.
Since the draft has not come out in regional languages, the Karnataka High Court restrained the government from publishing the final document till it was accessible to a wider audience.
Although the government extended the deadline from June 30 to August 11, 2020, for the general public to pool in their opinions through emails, it shut down three main online websites on which youngsters of this country protested against EIA 2020. “We reasonably have a clear basis, based on our correspondence as well as our technical analysis, that this was a domain seizure by the government of this website” says Apar Gupta, executive director of Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF).
The EIA 2020 amendment does not do justice to the fundamental principles of environmental impact assessment and is more focussed in easing the clearance for the industries than the protection of the environment.
Economic growth, no doubt is important, more so at this trying time. However we should also bear in mind the cost which is to be paid for it, sooner or later.
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WhatsApp's New Privacy Policy: Collecting Metadata and Its Implications
According to WhatsApp’s new privacy policy, the app is set to collect “only” user’s Metadata. Metadata can reveal a lot more than merely the app usage of a person. Former NSA General Counsel Stewart Baker stated, “Metadata absolutely tells you everything about somebody’s life. If you have enough metadata you don’t really need content.”
This article explores the ways in which WhatsApp is underselling the true estimation of the significance of Metadata.
Facebook owned WhatsApp recently announced the update of its privacy policy terms. 8th of February, 2021 was initially set as the deadline for users to either accept the new privacy policy or delete their account. By this time, most of us have already witnessed or been a part of the backlash that WhatsApp is experiencing. LocalCircles conducted a survey and the results indicated that 15% of India’s users are likely to move away entirely from the app while 36% will drastically reduce the usage and 67% of users are likely to discontinue chats with WhatsApp business accounts.
To reinstall trust in its users, WhatsApp released a clarification stating that the new policy update doesn’t compromise privacy of messages with friends and family. Furthermore, it explains that the update includes changes related to WhatsApp business accounts are optional too.
However, owing to severe backlash, WhatsApp has pushed the deadline to May 15 while they further clarify their policy updates.
It is true that WhatsApp cannot read our messages as it is end-to-end encrypted which implies that only a message’s sender and receiver can read it. The updated privacy policy intends to alert users that some businesses would soon be using Facebook-servers to store messages with their customers. By accepting the new privacy policy, users will be allowing WhatsApp to reserve all rights to collect your data and share it with the expansive Facebook and Instagram networks ‘regardless of whether you have profiles on those apps.’
By using WhatsApp, you may now be sharing your usage data, your phone’s unique identifier, your location when the location service is enabled, among several other types of metadata. A culmination of all your metadata is linked to your identity.
The value of metadata has been underestimated since the term isn’t clearly understood. Metadata is data about our data. For instance, in a cell phone conversation, the conversation itself isn’t metadata but everything except that is metadata. Data regarding who you called, how long you spoke for, where you were when you placed the call, where the other person on the line was and the time you placed the call. Consider a situation when every time you made a call to someone, you had to inform a particular person about who you called, how long you spoke for, when and where and all other details except the content spoken. This applies for every single call and everyone else’s metadata is also being recorded. The person owning the metadata can analyze and tell a lot about your personal life. Who you work with, who you spend time with, who you are close to, where you are at particular times and so on…
Kurt Opsahl, in his post in the Electronic Frontier Foundation, gives an example of how companies and governments collect intimate details about your life with the disguised use of the word called metadata. The following examples are an excerpt of his article:
“They know you rang a phone sex service at 2:24 am and spoke for 18 minutes. They know that you called suicide prevention hotline from the Golden Gate Bridge.
They know you spoke with an HIV testing service, then your doctor, then your health insurance company in the same hour.
They know you called a gynaecologist, spoke for a half hour, and then called the local Planned Parenthood's number later that day. But nobody knows what you spoke about.”
Metadata provides more than required context to know some of the most intimate and personal details of your lives. When this data is correlated with the records of other phone calls, one can easily obtain a lot more data and track our daily routines. This is merely about phone calls. WhatsApp includes a lot more features and will collect metadata of chats, businesses and money transactions.
In WhatsApp’s words:
“We collect service-related, diagnostic, and performance information. This includes information about your activity (such as how you use our Services, how you interact with others using our Services, and the like), log files, and diagnostic, crash, website, and performance logs and reports.”
In addition to this, WhatsApp also collects information about IP address, OS, browser information and phone number.
Stanford’s computer scientists conducted an analysis to understand the extent of intrusion of privacy using metadata. The scientists built an app for smartphones. The app was developed to retrieve metadata of calls and text messages from more than 800 volunteers’ phone logs. The researchers received records of more than 250,000 calls and 1.2 million texts. Their inexpensive analysis revealed personal details of several people like their health records. Researchers were also able to learn that one of their participants owned an AR semi-automatic rifle with only metadata.
Gen. Michael Hayden, the former head of the National Security Agency once stated that “the U.S. government kill[s] people based on metadata.”
In 2016, Facebook was involved in the infamous data privacy scandal which centered around collection of personal data of over 87 million people by Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting and strategic analyst firm. The organization harvested user data for targeted advertising, particularly political advertising during the 2016 U.S. election. While the central offender was Cambridge Analytica, the apparent indifference for data privacy to Facebook facilitated Cambridge Analytical and several other organizations.
In June 2018, Facebook confirmed that it was sharing data with at least 4 Chinese companies, Huawei, Oppo, Lenovo and TCL. Facebook was under scrutiny from the U.S. intelligence agencies on security issues as they claimed that the data with the Chinese telecommunication companies would provide an opportunity for a foreign espionage.
In September 2019, there were reports that the Indian government contemplated making it mandatory for companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon, to share the public data of users.
The Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY) was planning on issuing new guidelines under the Information Technology Act which according to which tech giants would have been required to share freely available data or the public information that they collate in the course of their operations, including traffic, buying and illness patterns.
Europe is exempted from WhatsApp’s new privacy policy as EU antitrust authorities fined Facebook 110 million euros for misleading the regulators during the takeover of WhatsApp in 2014. EU’s strict privacy laws empowers regulators to fine up to 4% of global annual revenue of the companies that breach the bloc’s rules.
Your Metadata is extremely personal. By giving WhatsApp the authority to access it, you are giving access to several other organizations, businesses and it also makes you more vulnerable to third-party hackers and trackers. WhatsApp has given multiple assurances about its updated privacy policy being noninvasive. However, most of these assurances are cleverly worded and misleading statements. It is important to read through the fine print of the new policy before accepting it.
