Asia
Growing up in Bangladesh, I experienced my first “wrong-number” phone call when I was 10 years old, during the time of landlines, before we had mobiles or smartphones. Wrong-number calls would usually be initiated by young men who would dial a random number until they heard a young woman answer. Then they would try to strike up a conversation by asking the recipient a barrage of questions about their name, age, location, family, marital status and even daily activities. Over the years I h...
Media Matters for Democracy (MMfD) has published multiple reports highlighting concerns with the Prevention of Electronic Crime Act (PECA) and offered recommendations for improvement. In their first comprehensive review of PECA 2016, they took a look at the procedural issues that have defined the implementation of the law. This study presents a brief overview of the implementation of PECA. It is based on two case studies; first, an overview of procedural and other issues ...
Each time I switched on the Netflix app on my phone, I activated the subtitles. They allowed me to focus on the screen and the show on hand during any periods of brain fog or anxious moments. The closed captioning was an added bonus for me. We know that subtitles and closed captioning are ways to make the content accessible to deaf and hard of hearing persons. But they are also useful for many ...
Welcome to the 11th monthly round-up of developments impacting your local access networks. 1. Call for grants The GSMA Connected Society will be launching its Connect Society Innovation Fund for Rural Connectivity this October 2018. With support from the UK Department for International Development, the program fund aims to support innovative new technology solutions for connecting unserve...
25 national, regional and international civil society organisations (CSOs) express their deep concern over the suspension and expulsion of 18 international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) in Pakistan. These organizations serve millions of people in Pakistan and contribute to the country’s economic and social development. We are also concerned that these actions indicate further restric...
This is an attempt to narrate the speak-out movement led by the Dalit-Bahujan women in Kerala. It is a social media-based (particularly through Facebook) campaign, that is still ongoing in Kerala, to narrativise the experiences of sexual harassment faced by Dalit-Bahujan women. These attacks had happened in their work place, within friends’ circles and political spaces. Surprisingly, the wome...
The Association for Progressive Communications (APC) calls on the government of India to adopt and implement strong data protection safeguards in view of the verdict of the Supreme Court of India on the unique identification project, Aadhar. On 26 September 2018, the Supreme Court of India, while upholding the constitutionality of Aadhar, India's unique biometric identity programme, made some s...
Right to Know - India’s Internet Avant-garde, is a podcast series about people coming to terms with the internet in some of India’s poorest rural and tribal districts, where many have not seen a television, or as in the ancient city of Chanderi, locals are still coming to terms with cars and scooters. This podcast series, presented and produced by Andrew Garton for the Association for...
Right to Know - India’s Internet Avant-garde, is a podcast series about people coming to terms with the internet in some of India’s poorest rural and tribal districts, where many have not seen a television, or as in the ancient city of Chanderi, locals are still coming to terms with cars and scooters. This podcast series, presented and produced by Andrew Garton for the Associat...
This member story was featured in the 2017 APC Annual Report, as part of our work on rights. A legal notice has been issued by VOICE to the Secretary of Posts and Telecommunications and Chairman of the Bangladesh Telecommunications Regulatory Commission (BTRC) demanding protection of the rights of mobile consumers and particularly the right to privacy. The notice was issued by VOICE’s legal a...
Association for Progressive Communications (APC) 2018
Unless otherwise stated, content on the APC website is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)