On 24th April 2019, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree which would simplify the procedure for acquiring Russian citizenship in the regions of Eastern Ukraine namely, Donetsk and Luhansk. He followed this up with another signing on 1st May. It extended the citizenship right to other categories of Ukrainians including the natives of Crimea.
Putin defended the move on humanitarian grounds but it drew criticism from the European Union and Ukraine. Despite the opposition, Russia went ahead with the distribution of passports in these regions of Ukraine.
The Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs had announced on Jan 1, 2020, that it had granted citizenship tonearly 196,000 Ukrainians. Moscow plans to grant one million citizenships to people in these areas by the end of 2020,
Russian President Vladimir Putin defended the move by saying there was nothing wrong in granting citizenship to the people of Eastern Ukraine and cited the example of countries like Poland and Romania which also grant citizenship on the basis of ethnicity.
At the end of a summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un Putin told the reporters "How are Russians in Ukraine worse than Romanians, Poles or Hungarians? I don't see anything unusual here."
The move, however, has drawn criticism from Ukraine and the European Union. It also dashed hopes of reviving the Russia-Ukraine peace talks that have stalled since 2015.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the new President of Ukraine who was less confrontational towards Russia during his campaign said “Unfortunately, this decree does not bring us closer to the ultimate goal of a ceasefire.” He further stated “These actions are yet more confirmation for the world community of Russia’s true role as an aggressor state, which is waging a war against Ukraine.”
Pavlo Klimkin, Ukraine’s Foreign Minister termed it a “continuation of aggression and interference in our internal affairs.” He was seen advising people in a twitter post that Russia had deprived them of the present and was now trying to trespass on their future.
Ukraine warned that it would not recognize the passport in the event of its usage for crossing the border. The then Prime Minister of the country, Volodymyr Groysman wrote on Twitter,” I emphasize that we will never recognize the citizenship issued by the aggressor country” and termed the passports as a “flagrant violation of all rights and morals”.
The Deputy Foreign Minister of Ukraine targeted the timing of the announcement and said that it was a challenge “not only for Kyiv but Berlin, Paris, Brussels and Washington”.
The EU also stated that it was against the spirit and the objectives of the Minsk peace accords signed by Russia and Ukraine in 2015. Federica Mogherini, a spokeswoman for the EU’s top diplomat, said the distribution of Russian passports was "another attack on Ukraine's sovereignty by Russia."
Putin’s move to grant passports in Eastern Ukraine has been cited as Russia’s unwillingness towards granting Ukraine full control over the Russian occupied regions. It indicates Moscow’s intentions to increase Russian influence in the country and hence weaken the sovereignty of Ukraine as a nation.
It appears that Russia has now weaponised the passport in its six-year long undeclared war with Ukraine in a hope that this will vastly improve its claim of working to protect the interest of Russian citizens in the disputed region of Eastern Ukraine.
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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.
