Prologue I visited the BMC Building market in Powai - this is a run down building built by the Municipal corporation for small businesses and shops. The vision was to build an equivalent of the Sim-Lim square in Singapore - when it was constructed, it had escalators, elevators and air-conditioned corridors. However, over the years, the escalators stopped working due to lack of maintenance, and leases expired and rentals fell rapidly during the Covid-19 pandemic, after which the air-conditioning broke down and recently one out of the two elevators also broke down. Today when I visited the place, it was stinking of human sweat (its high-summer season in Mumbai) and the lack of air-conditioning made it worse. The staircase was so dirty that I did not feel like taking it, so I took the lift, but as soon as I boarded the lift, I regretted my decision. The lift was occupied by 5 delivery runners, two of them carrying dairy and one of them carrying meat - the stench in the lift was even mor...

  Image Credit: YouTube grab of Futuristic Inter-galactic spaceport terminal from Men In Black International I am right now at the Dubai airport watching the eclectic mix of humanity - travellers, visitors and residents - at this ‘meeting point of civilizations and races’ that Dubai has now become. In the last 10 years, Dubai has transformed from an Oil rich destination where people would come to earn bags of money (even if they had to live destitute), to a bustling metropolis where people come to enjoy a good life. Not only has lifestyle transformed in Dubai for the better, but its population has burgeoned from a mere 62000 in 1970 to 3.05 million in 2024 with immigrants powering almost the entire rise in numbers. Notably, Emiratis currently constitute 7 odd percentage of the total population, and in the next 10 years Dubai is planning to double its population plunging the percentage of natives to 3 and half percent only! However, immigrants are not allowed to gain citizenship of ...

Image generated by Microsoft AI Designer Few weeks ago I commented that the India-US collaboration is missing the key subject of Data Protection law. The Data Protection Bill was still in 'draft' stage then, and now that its been passed by the parliament, I got reading it.  While my misgivings about Data privacy not being featured in India-US discussions as well as my reservations about the Bill excluding governments and regulators from its purview, continue; I must say that the the law itself has come out as a nicely drafted piece of legislation, and a departure from the legalese of other countries' laws such as EU's GDPR and CCPA/CCPR in California, United States. Firstly , the language of the bill is quite lucid and easy to understand - for people like me who are not lawyers, the language was quite easy to understand and digest. Not just simple language, but the Act includes Illustrations within its text to clarify the meaning and intention of different clauses - wh...

Note: This post of cross-posted from www.yaksas.in ; while I am a participant in the discussion quoted below, but sincere thanks are due to Uday Mittal for compiling this into a blog post and publishing online .  The other day I participated in an interesting discussion. The discussion took place in an information privacy forum comprised of professionals from various industries. The topic of discussion was Legal ramifications of sharing screenshots of a conversation held on messengers such as WhatsApp, Hike, Telegram etc. (We’ll take WhatsApp as an example). Point(s) of Discussion I initiated the discussion with the following questions: If an individual forwards a screenshot of a WhatsApp group conversation to another individual outside that group; will such sharing be considered: Invasion of privacy of the members of the WhatsApp group? Punishable against provision IT Act section 43 (unauthorized sharing of computer data) or 43A (sharing of personal information ...