Senses prevail: India's Voter Database will not be gifted to Google | Hacker News Reader

Senses prevail: India's Voter Database will not be gifted to Google

economictimes.indiatimes.com

8 pointsshireeshj8 comments

Am I the only one who thinks this is a step backwards? Electoral Roll data is already publicly available on EC websites, with probably worse data security and privacy procedures than anything Google would implement. Anyone who has seen one of the Indian government's 90's era websites, half of which are regularly defaced by 'hackers', and the other half blinding you with blink tags and marquees, should have been looking forward to something designed my competent people.

Rather than derail the procedure completely, they should have negotiated on having systems completely based in India with hardened outwards-facing security.

This is all coming from a CS student who recently came of voting age and wants to participate in the democratic process but has so far been completely put off by how wasted his efforts have been, and how hard it has been to get anything done (like get the correct spelling of my name on the roll).

Can you point me to where Electoral Roll data is already publicly available on EC websites?

Let me try to explain the concerns using couple of points:

(1) Google (if it wants to), can influence the opinion of the entire country, by promoting content it wants people to see. That essentially could mean, a government coming to power that Google likes, not the people of India.

(2) With India lacking any data privacy law, this data will flow to google's data centers outside India. In a (future) war like situations, this data could become an important weapon.

India's Election Commission, a constitutional body responsible for conducting free and fair elections in the country, has finally heard the concerns of the citizens and has called off its plans to use google to help voters locate polling stations. In the guise of providing this as a social service, Google was trying to get the demographic data of the entire population of India directly from the government. What was that again? "Dont be evil"? yeh! right.

Here is a link to the news paper article announcing this http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation...

The EC said Google had proposed to provide electoral look up services for citizens to help in Commission's efforts for better electoral information services.

What's wrong with that?

Are you affiliated with any of the local companies lobbying to get that contract instead?

Use google to find that... :)

Why isn't google proposing something like this to US government? Their election system sucks - remember how George Bush got his second term?

Why are they even asking for it.It is in the public domain. http://eci.nic.in/eci_main1/Linkto_erollpdf.aspx Some of them might be in the local languages, I am sure google can parse those pdfs.

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