Naavi.org

(PS: The device picture shown above is a conceptual replica. It was not actually built and Mr Palmer was perhaps terminated by Meta for other reasons and not for developing this lethal idea.. But the danger of the concept seems plausible and could be built by others)

It is surprising how some criminal minds work. When I urged the need for Neuro Rights legislation in India during his speech at the IDPS 2022, the  existence  of  a concept like Oculus VR set with a possible Microwave blast  was not highlighted.  I only highlighted the developments of Neuro Technology such as Brain Implants and Brain Computer Interfaces that can be misused by the operators to unauthorizedly alter the human mind by manipulating the neuro data.

Mr Palmer Luckey who is identified as an “Entrepreneur” by the Wikipedia is associated with a potential invention of a VR set which can have an embedded Microwave bomb that gets triggered when the wearer is playing a video game and get killed. The Microwave blast would be directed at the brain of the head set wearer killing him in physical life.

Law makers need to seriously think if this technology development is not stopped right now, will it not be a facilitation of  plain “Murder” or “Abatement to suicide”?

If so, it is time to endorse the need for Neuro rights legislation in India now.

The basic requirement of law is

a) Recognize the form of “Neuro Data” as a kind of data coming under “Protected data” 

b) Recognize “Neuro privacy” as a kind of “Protected right”

c) Recognize “harm” due to neurological manipulations

c) Recognized a higher level of “Consent” called “Witnessed Consent” to protect Neuro right

The rest of the law related to penalties and punishments can be considered under other provisions of the data protection act as well as ITA 2000 and IPC as a “Contravention of law”.  The Oculus must me considered as a weapon of death and its inventor and distributor should be punishable under law including punishment of death for third degree murder or attempt thereof.

Considering the urgent need for legislative protection, apart from using other provisions under the “Gaming Control Notification” that the Government is considering, the law on Personal Data Protection, a draft of which is expected to be released anytime must include provisions of Neuro Rights Protection.

Some of the suggested provisions are as follows.

1.“Neuro Data” may be defined as- “Neuro data means the electromagnetic signals that are collected from or fed into the human brain by a Brain Computer Interface in binary form.”

2.“Neuro Privacy” may be defined as- “Neuro Privacy” means the choice of an individual to determine to what extent the individual may share his neuro space with others”

3.“Neurological harm”  may be defined as – Neurological manipulation which alters the ability of an individual to take autonomous decisions” should be added to the definition of harm to extend the “psychological manipulations”

4.“Witnessed Consent” may be defined as-  consent provided by a data principal which is witnessed by independent third parties who donot have conflicting interest in the processing of the personal data under circumstances that the data principal may not be reasonably expected to provide a free consent, and includes sharing of neuro data or sharing of personal data when the data principal is not in a medical condition to provide informed consent.”

I would urge readers to read the series of articles on the suggestions for the new data protection law available at here.

Readers  can  also  view  the  keynote  address  of  naavi  at   IDPS 2022 which is available below.

I request viewers to send their views on whether the time has come to bring Neuro Rights into the Indian law in the current “Draft Digital Personal Data Protection Bill” that the Government is now contemplating.

Please join your voice here so that when FDPPI submits its request to the Government to add these provisions into the draft, your voice will also be heard.

Naavi

Reference:

India Today article

Through separate Gazette Notifications, Government of India has declared three more Banks namely Bank of Baroda, Union Bank of India and Punjab National Bank as “Protected Systems” under Section 70 of ITA 2000.

They join ICICI Bank and HDFC Bank declared earlier .

The corresponding notifications are available here.

Naavi

The introduction of CBDC (Central Bank Digital Currency) by RBI has been perplexing to many.

The reason is that India has developed a functional system of virtual currency system with mobile payments. For all practical purpose, “Mobile” is our digital wallet and we make both small retail payments and large RTGS payments just through our handheld device.

Despite the concern of security through viruses and phishing, the system appears to be running more smoothly than any other country in the world could think of. Hence the need for CBDC is itself perplexing.

CBDC is going to be issued directly by RBI as identifiable tokenized secure electronic documents from a secure server. Each token will be identifiable with a serial number and distributed to the Bankers who may there after distribute it to the retail market.

In this system there is no “Mining” and also there is no possibility of any premium like what Bitcoin type of Crypto’s are generating today. It is not the decentralized Crypto currency system that dominates the alternate digital currency system in the world. It is not likely to use Blockchain technology in the creation of CBDCs while the distributors may opt to use Block chain technology for their services.

If so, what is the advantage of introducing this new system is what we need to decypher.

At present RBI is likely to issue only CBDC-W which is a wholesale product to be used concurrently with the current account ledger they maintain now with the Banks. This is just a method to establish the system and notionally create a stock of CBDCs in India.

CBDC-R is not immediately being released and hence the public are unlikely to have access to the CBDC. If free Public access to CBDC-R  is to be enabled, it  needs a fool proof/ infallible  system where public can view the attributes of the token but not able to tamper with it. They should also be able to hold control/possession which they can transfer to another person.

This requires development of the “Wallet” system similar to what is used in the Crypto Wallet system but have to be managed by “Authorized CBDC Banks”.

In Bank operated wallets transactions move from one wallet to another both maintained by Banks and hence cannot guarantee anonymity of the transactions.

If the Government permits “Hardware Wallets”, then public can hold their stock of CBDCs in the physically held hardware devices which can be a USB device or a wireless enabled device in the form of a “Card”. The contents of the device should be viewable and the owner should be able to take out or place in tokens as if he is taking money out of his purse or putting it in. Ideally the view should be embedded in the device or it should be through the mobile device with its own security implications.

These devices need to be  secured so that there is no backdoor in the OEM that can steal money right from your hardware wallet. They should also be convenient to use. If they are stolen, there should be  some mechanism to restore the money from a back up.

While these devices are an exciting proposition for the business to create, once they become available,  they will also be instruments to keep black money and  continue the parallel economy without hindrance.

I hope RBI will remember that it is important to prevent raise of digital black money since it is more dangerous than the current black money system where criminals need to physically store large amount of black money.

Since ordinary users will not feel the need for the CBDC-R to replace the UPI system they are getting accustomed to, the need for CBDC-R to be introduced is at present very low and can be deferred as long as necessary.

On the other hand CBDC-W can be extended to Exporters and Importers on demand like the release of Foreign Exchange in the current system.

The real benefit of creating the CBDC as a monetary unit would be that India can join a consortium of countries with their own CBDCs and create a system of international settlement outside the purview of the US dollar dominated systems at present. This will protect India from any future sanctions that US may impose the way they tried to monetarily strangle Russia during the Ukraine conflict.

Liberation from the hegemony of the US financial system on the Indian foreign exchange transactions appear to be the real benefit of the creation of CBDT. As more and more countries join hands in this new system, there will be a new economic order in the world.

Presently 10 countries have reportedly fully launched CBDCs,  while a total of 105 countries are exploring the possibilities. 50 countries are said to be in advanced phase of exploration. China pilot is expected to expand in 2023. South Korea, Japan and Russia are in exploration stage like India. ( Refer CBDC Tracker here)

It is expected that the introduction of CBDC as a concept will accelerate in future and it appears that RBI has taken the right decision to segregate the CBDC-W and CBDC-R. This will enable introduction of CBDC in to the monetary system without opening up the flood gates of retail participation which may come initially only from black money hoarders and a few technology adventurists.

If CBDC-R has to be introduced, I would advocate the introduction of an interest bearing CBDC even if the interest is marginal like 1% or 2%. It will be a sovereign guaranteed investment that may attract investments from abroad. The SB rates of Banks are today higher and hence there is no danger of cannibalization of Bank deposits because of the interest. This will act as an incentivisation for people to convert their idle cash balance to CBDC.

RBI can also consider other innovations to make CBDC-R relevant. Otherwise it will only be a facilitation of Black money holding and is an un necessary instrument in the Indian society.

Let us observe the developments. This could be a serious disruption of the world economic order and India needs to take early charge of the developments.

(Comments are welcome)

Naavi

The contents of Naavi’s website www.neurorights.in  are now easily accessible on Google play store for Android phones. The link is below.

Naavi

Day 3 of the IDPS 2022 went on well and the three day virtual conference was successfully closed with a valedictory address from Dr Anantha Prabhu, Professor of Engineering at Sahyadri College, Mangaluru.

The day started with a presentation from Advocate (Dr) Prashant Mali on the Adjudication and Appellate Tribunal system for Data Protection.

Dr Srinivas Yamanandra, of PayTM then spoke about Artificial intelligence and the issues related to Ethics.

In a well articulated speech, Dr Srinivas explained many nuisances about Artificial Intelligence with examples on how it can be used beneficially.

In a subsequent session, Mr Harpreet Singh  Bhatia, CEO of Ibentos gave a  presentation on how online interactions are changing. He spoke in depth  on the use of MetaVerse for online interactions.

Another highlight of the day was the presentation on Neuro Rights by Naavi taking the discussion which was started by Dr Rafael Yuste on Day 1, further.

There were three insightful panel discussions on the day all of which were extremely interesting.

In the first panel discussion under the moderation of Mr Subbarayudu, This panel discussed Data Valuation and Data Monetization aspects.

The next panel moderated by Mr Ramesh Venkataraman discussed Data Audits and different frameworks present and upcoming.

During the discussions, Naavi explained how the Data Protection Compliance Standard of India (DPCSI) covers most of the constraints that are observed in the current frameworks.

The third panel moderated by Mr Radharaman with Ms Reena Bengeri and Alok Arora as members, discussed the need for  sectoral codes of practice.

The Program then culminated with a summary presentation by Mr Ramesh Venkataraman and the valedictory address by Dr Ananta Prabhu.

In summary the event went on extremely well.

The videos of each of the sessions as well as the videos made available in the repositories section would be made available shortly. Watch out for information in this site.

We are now in the process of collecting feedback on the program for which a small feedback form will be sent by the FDPPI team to all the participants as well as those who go through the recorded videos in the next few days.

Naavi

Report on Day 2

Report on Day 1

The third and last day’s program in IDPS 2022 is as follows.

The Day 2 ended successfully with 4 key note addresses and three panel discussions.

The day was full of discussions on Technology. It started with the presentation of Mr Srinivas Poosarla of Infosys on Artificial intelligence and followed by automation of  Data Security Governance by Vamsikrishna of QRC.

The Star session of the day was the presentation of Dr Pavan Duggal on Privacy in the Meta Verse era where he brought out the nuances of legal issues that emerged from the new technology.

He pointed out that Meta Verse has a potential to be misused like the Artificial Intelligence and this has to be recognized and handled by the law makers. He made references to the current law in the form of ITA 2000 and indicated how it can be extended to Meta Verse in many ways but advocated for a refinement of the law to address the Meta Verse.

In the other Key Note address on Continued Relevance of ITA 2000, Commander Mukesh Saini extended the discussions to again highlight the presence of ITA 2000 as the current Data Protection Law of India.

He also touched on the CERT In guidelines and gave the perspective of the legal scenario for Privacy Protection in India.

There were three panel discussions during the day one on Privacy in Corporate DNA, Cross border transfer of data and the other on Emerging Technologies and Challenges.

All the three discussions provided wonderful insights into the issues and challenges in the respective area and also discussed the solutions thereof.

The video content of all sessions will be available shortly and will be provided .

We now await the third and final day proceedings today.

Naavi