Talking Data to the Fourth Pillar: Safeguarding Fourth Pillar through Data Privacy, Protection, and Safety Awareness Programme
Campaign description: The campaign aims at developing an understanding of the concept of privacy, data protection and online safety, to facilitate and enable the journalist community to make informed choices while pursuing journalism. A four-part module has been developed to address the following four questions respectively: 1) What is privacy, and why is it essential to journalists? 2) What digital privacy threats do journalists face? 3) How can journalists keep themselves safe; what platforms and practices maximize journalists’ safety and privacy? and 4) What do journalists need to know to make privacy understandable for the general audience? What hot-button issues do Indian and Bangladeshi journalists need to educate the general public about?
Module 1 serves as an introductory module for participants. In this module, participants explored through facilitated and purposefully mediated group discussions and relevant readings, what privacy as a concept means to them, how and why digital privacy is a fundamental human right, and is important to individuals in a society, the cultural and gender-based challenges of thinking about privacy in south Asian societies, and the different angles and ways in which privacy needs to be thought of in order to be meaningful and inclusive of different communities. It also introduces participants to what autonomy means, and why it is particularly important to women and queer individuals.
Module 2 addresses why and in what ways journalists are at the receiving end of threats and intimidation, including to their privacy. It addresses the threats that are posed to working journalists, and how do journalists from different caste, class, gender, and sexuality groups experience these threats differently? This module facilitated the discussion of real-world instances of journalists and journalistic work being compromised due to invasions of their digital privacy, the kinds of specific threats faced by journalists from different actors, and how these threats may affect different caste, gender, and sexuality groups differently.
Module 3 helps facilitate trainings with journalists and looks at what are some practical steps journalists can take to protect their devices from attacks on their digital privacy. It provided an insight into how they as journalists can avoid breaching the privacy of the public, and protect themselves against online harassment. Further, this module also informed journalists on how to undertake reporting and interviewing in different journalistic situations in a way that is cognizant and empathetic towards the rights, privacy, and subjectivity of the interviewees.
Module 4 discusses what digital privacy and data collection issues the journalists need to address in the near future. It dwells on the policy issues and legal developments around data protection and digital privacy that journalists in India need to be well-versed in. The module addresses how the governmental frameworks and policies are most likely to lead to data privacy concerns for the citizenry, what laws and systems does the country have in place around data collection and protection, and what laws are in the process of framing that need the most attention from journalists and civil society in the near future.
Module 4 discusses what digital privacy and data collection issues the journalists need to address in the near future. It dwells on the policy issues and legal developments around data protection and digital privacy that journalists in India need to be well-versed in. The module addresses how the governmental frameworks and policies are most likely to lead to data privacy concerns for the citizenry, what laws and systems does the country have in place around data collection and protection, and what laws are in the process of framing that need the most attention from journalists and civil society in the near future.