In the late evening hours of 5th September, 2017, journalist and activist Gauri Lankesh was unlocking the door to her house after a long day at work. However, she was never destined to set foot inside again, as armed assailants fired seven shots before fleeing, some of which hit Lankesh and led to her death at the scene.
Lankesh was an outspoken critic of right-wing and Hindutva ideologies, and it is widely believed that this was the reason she was targeted. This corresponds with a lot of the arrests that have been made in the case, most of whom—including the people who shot her—were people who belonged to Hindutva groups.
Lankesh was one of three children born to poet and journalist Palya Lankesh who established the weekly Kannada-language Lankesh Patrike. Lankesh followed in her father’s footsteps, starting out in the Times Of India and then working with Sunday magazine for close to a decade. She married, and later divorced, opinion columnist Chidanand Rajghatta, after which she remained single.
Lankesh had been a journalist for 16 years when her father passed away. She and her brother Indrajit initially planned on ceasing the publication of Lankesh Patrike, but was convinced by the publisher to continue. Gauri became the editor, while Indrajit handled the business side of things. However, due to creative and ideological differences, the siblings had a falling out, leading to Gauri establishing her own Kannada weekly called Gauri Lankesh Patrike.
In the last few days before her death, Lankesh and her team were in the process of reshaping her magazine, Gauri Lankesh Patrike. After her death, the staff of Gauri Lankesh Patrike published the last edition of the magazine before shutting it down for a few months.
A year after her death, the staff released the first edition of Nyaya Patha (Way Of Justice), a weekly Kannada-language tabloid. Currently, they also run two websites, Gauri Lankesh News in English and Naanu Gauri in Kannada.
Lankesh’s death was described by the BBC as the most high-profile journalist murdered in recent years. A Karnataka Special Investigation Team (SIT) was formed in 2018 to probe the murder case. The charge sheet for the 18 arrested for their involvement in the case runs thousands of pages long and supposedly provides damning evidence, but similar to cases of other murdered journalists, the case is slow to move forward in court, especially due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Lankesh’s family, along with the families of journalists like M.M. Kalburgi have been appealing to the state government for a special fast-track court to be set up to ensure speedy justice, especially after special measures such as SITs and length investigations to ensure an in-depth probe into the cases.
In light of the third anniversary of Lankesh’s death, activists all over the country are organising a campaign by the name of #IfWeDoNotRise, to speak out against the crackdown on dissenting journalists and activists. Many journalists have been murdered in manners similar to Lankesh and others are arrested under laws like the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, which has been accused of being misused to clamp down on freedom of speech.
Those protesting against rightward shift in governance look up to figures like Gauri Lankesh who paid for their activism with their life, but are also raising their voices to ensure that it doesn’t happen again. Forgetting Lankesh and the circumstances of her death means forgetting the constant threat of Hindutva indoctrination and its violence, which is only increasing under the present ruling dispensation.
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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.
