-The Hindu Local firms will be at a disadvantage if big tech companies are given plum roles Since early last year, WhatsApp has busily piloted its payment system in India. WhatsApp Pay relies on the Indian government’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) system to facilitate inter-bank transactions. Regulatory approval that would allow its nation-wide introduction is stuck on one point: the Indian government has asked WhatsApp to localise all data processing related to...

-The Indian Express Should data be allowed to flow freely or localised at source? As IT Ministry prepares to present data protection Bill in Parliament and countries argue at global forums, a look at both sides of the debate. The IT Ministry’s Bill on data protection is scheduled to be introduced in Parliament during the current session. Worldwide, the data flow debate is playing out at the World Trade Organisation (WTO)...

-The Economic Times The world’s oldest networked infrastructure, money, is increasingly dematerialising and fusing with the world’s latest networked infrastructure, the Internet. As the network effects compound, disruptive acceleration hurtle us towards financial utopia, or dystopia. Our fate depends on what we get right and what we get wrong with the law, code and architecture, and the market. The Internet, unfortunately, has completely transformed from how it was first architected. From a...

-The Telegraph Lucknow (Uttar Pradesh): Many a fear has been expressed over the potential misuse of the Aadhaar card, ranging from privacy violation to online looting to suppression of dissent. Now, a headmaster in Uttar Pradesh has been accused of opening an unforeseen flank by showing the door to 17 pupils on the pretext that they hadn't submitted their Aadhaar numbers. Rajesh Kumar, the headmaster of the government-run Laltapur Primary School in Chandauli...

-The Indian Express A citizen-centric data eco-system is necessary to protect privacy. Who owns my data? In this question, if you replace data with a physical object, like a car or a house, the answer would obviously be “me”. That’s true not only of physical objects, but also of content because the latter is governed by copyright laws. The principle is you are the owner of the content you create, such as...