09 Mar 12 | Middle East and North Africa
Last year, a number of students from Bahrain Polytechnic were expelled from the university for “participating in unlicensed gatherings and marches”. Targeting anti-government students, evidence for the expulsions was mostly obtained from social media websites such as Facebook.
21 year-old Asma Darwish was among the 63 students expelled from the university in June 2011, after encouraging people to participate in unauthorised marches against the regime. In a subsequent interrogation from a committee of members from Bahrain Polytechnic and the Ministry of Interior, Darwish was shown Facebook activities that the committee had obtained from her account, including status updates and comments.
After an external review of the cases, 32 of those, including Darwish, were allowed to return to Bahrain Polytechnic, but following her return, she was repeatedly harassed and threatened by fellow students, forcing her to leave Bahrain and flee to Switzerland.
Darwish described initially being excited about her return to the university in late September 2011, but soon became aware that things were not going to be easy.
Upon her return, she was asked to sign a code of conduct saying she would not get involved in activities with a political nature, and recalls discussing the code with an employee whose responsibility it was to obtain signatures from the returning students.
She said: “I went through a discussion with her regarding some of the points in the code, she had no answers except “this is the law in Bahrain, we must follow the constitution. I told her several times that the constitution was the problem.”
Darwish was forced to re-sit courses she had been expelled from, and asked to pay her tuition fees again. She soon noticed that students were behaving differently around her.
“I went to my classes, and I saw many students staring at me. In the four months that I was on the polytechnic campus before I had to leave Bahrain, I was harassed more than once by some of the students who were loyal to the regime. Students would sing pro-government songs when they saw me passing.”
She described one occasion when a fellow student began chanting “we shall die for you Abu Ali”, referring to Prime Minister Khalifa bin Salman, known as Abu Ali. On a different occasion, Darwish recalls another student staring at her until she was out of sight.
“I have always ignored these situations. But I was fed up of the polluted atmosphere that was not anything near an educational one. I decided to take my chance and report the harassment though I knew it was risky.”
Reporting the case sparked many concerns. Darwish explained it became apparent that the pro-government students who had been involved in her harassment could have her arrested, purely on the basis of her differing political views. She was determined to take her case further, despite the risks.
But it was not just through concern for herself that she progressed the case. Not alone in receiving harassment, Darwish wanted to help others who were being affected by similar treatment.
“So many other excellent, talented and creative students face difficulties learning in such an environment. Most of them don’t even enjoy studying at the Polytechnic after all they have gone through. Many are still harassed.”
Very few of the students report the cases of harassment: “Most of the students felt unsafe to come forward and report a case, saying “I prefer being harassed in campus than arrested and harassed in prison for reporting a case against a pro-government”.
She added: “The students who stand for democracy not only at Bahrain polytechnic, but other universities like the University of Bahrain are facing hardship getting the knowledge and education they deserve. Those students are being constantly targeted by the regime, through arrests, torture, and lack of appreciation and respect.
To this day, Darwish has not heard back from Bahrain Polytechnic on her case. Students who are disrupting the learning of others are still on campus, but she hopes that those who are being harassed will speak out. She advised students to write and talk about their harassment. “Your voice shall be heard,” she said.
Despite being forced to leave Bahrain in January 2012 and seek asylum in Switzerland, she was still subjected to phonecalls, threatening her with arrest, rape and murder. She cannot go back to Bahrain any time soon for fear of being persecuted.
“I left everything there and fled. I left my family, my friends and a country that I am in love with. I wanted to be a change maker, maybe I couldn’t while I was in Bahrain. But I promise that I will do my best to see the smile on the faces of my people in Bahrain once again.”
05 Mar 12 | Europe and Central Asia, Index Index, minipost
Local access to Facebook and two Russian-language websites has been blocked in Tajikistan, following articles critical of the country’s long serving president. Users attempting to access Facebook, tjknews.com or zvezda.ru are automatically re-directed to the home page of their provider. The shutdown was ordered by the state-run communications service after the two websites published articles critical of President Imomali Rakhmon. Several Facebook groups openly discuss politics and some users have been critical of the authorities.
01 Mar 12 | Uncategorized
Today, Google changed their privacy policy. These are documents we are never likely to read, and are even less likely to make headline news. But they shape how huge corporations build knowledge about us; how they lock us into commercial relationships we may not like; and even pose political and legal threats to us once governments and courts get interested in the data these policies govern.
Google, which may not be an inherently bad company, nevertheless wields enormous power. Much of this power is not about “search” or even “services” like Gmail, but about data. That data is farmed from many users, who contribute to Google’s hunger for information in return for access to the free and useful services they provide. Google’s primary customers are people needing that data, especially advertisers. Many people would say that we, the users, are in fact the product that Google is selling.
Thus their privacy policy is the bargain by which we hand over our data in return for free stuff. It should matter. Just as importantly, the power we have over that bargain, what we can negotiate, is vital to us, because as we know, privacy policies can change.
This is where Google have come unstuck. Making their policy simpler to understand is completely reasonable, and even sharing data across their services is a potentially useful idea. But European regulators, starting with the pan-EU data protection grouping called the Article 29 Working Party, don’t like the idea that users are being forced to share data across Google’s services without any ability to stop it.
They are also concerned that the new ways data may be used are not being described upfront. So, if your location data from your Android phone starts helping Google search understand the places you might want to visit, you may not expect this, and be upset or worse if it happens.
The French regulator CNIL has launched an investigation in order to establish if Google have broken EU Data Protection law, and EU Commissioner Viviane Reding has already weighed in to say she believes they have.
This isn’t a good fight for Google. They are already in a battle over the future rights we have over our data with exactly these people. Reding is proposing new protections, like fining companies up to 2 per cent of their income for data breaches, giving us the right to escape from companies like Facebook by getting our data back, and the right to delete our personal data from such companies. All these ideas may become law in the new data protection regulation that Reding is pushing.
One of the most controversial concepts for Google is the “privacy by default” principle. Such a principle could make it very hard for Google to force everyone to share data in new and unexpected ways. The expectation would be that new data sharing, as envisaged by Google’s new privacy policy, would require our active consent, and without it users could expect their privacy to be untouched.
Google, Yahoo and many other companies will be arguing against this idea, saying it may damage innovation. They argue that “privacy by default” isn’t needed, that notifying users is enough.
Facebook too, have recently introduced Netflix and Spotify services that failed to ask users if they want to share their listening habits with everyone on Facebook. This might not be the worst privacy violation in the world — but it’s certainly pretty annoying to an awful lot of people.
All of these companies are trying to do legitimate business and need the trust of their users. They also need the trust of governments. Right now, they seem to be actively proving that we really need the protections they claim should be dropped. We should listen to their actions, not their words.
Jim Killock is Executive Director of the Open Rights Group
@jimkillock
www.openrightsgroup.org
17 Feb 12 | Americas, Mexico
Mexican politicians are using social networks in sleight of hand similar to the ones they used in elections before the age of technology, say critics. Instead of paying voters to show up for the vote, or stuffing boxes — known practices in previous mid-term or presidential elections — today’s savvy campaign managers are helping their candidates swell up their numbers of Twitter followers and Facebook “likes”.
“They are doing online what they used to do offline,” according to Maria Elena Meneses, a media expert and professor at the Tecnologico de Monterrey who has studied elections and the Internet.
The campaign of ruling party presidential candidate Josefina Vasquez Mota drew much criticism after it allegedly used an internet bot to create a trending topic during recent elections to select the presidential candidate for the ruling Partido de Accion Nacional. News magazine Procesoreported that news sites that had measured the growth of the Vasquez Mota’s followers could determine how many of them were obtained through the bots.
Despite this criticism, Vasquez Mota seems to have one of the best online media teams. Her approach is similar to that used by US President Barak Obama in his 2008 presidential elections. The team’s use of various hashtags to trigger a trending topic, including the hashtag #HoyganaJosefina, which means “today Josefina wins”, helped expand her followers list by 31,000 in only a few hours in late January during her party’s internal election process (detractors say this is where the campaign used bots). The candidate’s Facebook page also has a lot of young followers.
Meneses says it is estimated that 15 million Internet users in Mexico are between the ages of 18 and 34. The young vote will be the more difficult to harness in the next presidential elections in July: 34 million new voters who turned 18 between 2006 and this year will be voting this presidential election.
But the presidential campaigns have a wooden Internet presence. Enrique Peña Nieto, the presidential candidate for the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), whose party ruled Mexico for 70 years until 2000, uses YouTube, but, Meneses says, not in a way that would attract young voters. “They only tape their campaign presentations. There is no give and take with the audience, which is what young voters want,” she says.
Meneses says none of the three presidential candidates for the three major parties — the PAN, the PRI and the left of center Partido Revolucionario Democratico, (PRD) — are using social media effectively to reach and communicate with common citizens. “They could use those sites to respond to uncomfortable questions,” she insists.
