Would you geotag your home for your government? 50 million Indians did https://restofworld.org/2022/would-you-geotag-your-home-for-your-government-50-million-indians-did/
A BJP political campaign encouraging people to upload their selfies and location has privacy advocates alarmed.
The photographs, many of which were uploaded along with location information, are still publicly available on the website. While the location information is not publicly available, it is retained by the website, which could lead to theft, hacking, and stalking. When siloed information, such as phone numbers, photographs, and location, is processed with other data sets, such as constituency population and voter preferences, it can make citizens vulnerable to “geo-propaganda,”said Srinivas Kodali, a researcher with the Free Software Movement of India,
Digital rights organization Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF) has raised concerns over the privacy policy of the Har Ghar Tiranga website — particularly about who owns the submitted data, and what it could be used for. “The privacy policy [of the website] seems like a collection of boilerplate clauses that have been thrown together,” Prateek Waghre, policy director at IFF, told Rest of World. “Wherever possible, the policy tries to shift responsibility away from itself.”
For instance, the privacy policy states that it will “protect [the data collected] within commercially acceptable means.” However, it does not define what these means are. Similarly, the language refers to a list of advertising partners, but their names are not disclosed. The policy also suggests that Har Ghar Tiranga’s services and products can be purchased, but nothing is listed for sale.