This project addresses the contentious public policy issue of privacy in India. The 2017 Indian Supreme Court held privacy to be a fundamental right. However, the ongoing legal case (2018) challenging the government's implementation of mandatory biometric identity for social welfare and services has highlighted concerns of data breaches and mass surveillance in the absence of strong data protection laws. This project examines the privacy discourse in India to understand how the government's biometric identity project conflicts with privacy as a fundamental right and will require new social values to be conceptualized in the context of data privacy breaches, social profiling, online behaviour tracking and state surveillance. It draws upon media/technology studies, legal studies and postcolonial history and employs qualitative methods including archival and textual analysis, media analysis and in-depth interviews. It offers a socio-legal, historical and technological account of privacy to identify new values in the context of wider society's expectation of personal data protection and the simultaneous need for robust data protection policies for digital governance in the information age: 1. Information integrity: Encompasses security of data flows across networks. 2. Information autonomy: Gives individuals control over data, freedom from being tracked/identified online, right to anonymity.

<<Final Report>>http://toyotafound.or.jp/research/2017/data/Pawan_Singh_final_report_D17-R-0128.pdf

I conducted fieldwork in 2018 in two phases. Phase 1 was in Bangalore from June-August and Phase 2 in Delhi from December - February. In phase 1, I conducted interviews with various experts working in the area of technological security, data privacy and biometric identity. I also gave a talk about privacy as an important value in information societies at the International Institute of Information Technology in Bangalore. I attended various talks and met representatives of technology start-ups. I also mentored a student of design from the Srishti School fo Design in Bangalore on his thesis about privacy by design in information technology services and systems. Together, we organized a design jam at a co-working space called NUMA where we debated the question of how technology start-ups should innovate using user data while also protecting their data privacy. The first phase of fieldwork was very productive and I managed to conduct qualitative interviews with many experts in the field.

Phase 2 in Delhi was focused on policymakers and lawyers. I interviewed these individuals on the legal and policy aspects

of data privacy in India. I discussed with them the provisions of the impending data protection bill, which has yet to become an act in India. I attended conferences and talks while also networking with members of think-tanks. By the end of my stay in Delhi, I felt confident of having collected rich qualitative data on my project. I returned to Melbourne and took a short break to recover from fieldwork.

I began working on a journal article in 2018, which underwent 3 rounds of blind peer-review and got published in 2019 in

the journal Information, Communication and Society. It tanks number 1 in the field of media, communication and technology studies. This paper examined the experiences of welfare beneficiaries under the biometric identity project, Aadhaar. Based on the testimonials of these beneficiaries, which I was able to access with the help of a lawyer in Delhi, I argued that the welfare beneficiaries' privacy concerns were about the dignity of their identity and not necessarily ownership of their data, which they had to submit mandatorily to the government to avail welfare benefits. I published another book chapter in an anthology called Platform Capitalism in India. This chapter comes out of a conference on Platform Capitalism in South Asia organized in 2019 at the Curtin University in Perth. I presented my research and was asked to submit a book chapter, Aadhaar: A Platform over Troubled Waters in the anthology. The chapter argues that Aadhaar's use by the private sector raises concerns about two crises, one of the legibility of Aadhaar as a tool of mass surveillance and the other of credibility in relation to data breaches. The chapter formulates new values for India's information society to address these crises.

These include information integrity and information autonomy. The anthology will be released in October 2020. I am in the

process of applying for jobs and preparing my manuscript on data privacy in India. Due to COVID-19, this has been a slow

process.