In January, the Election Commission ordered all states' chief electoral offers to put voter rolls listed on ECI's websites behind a captcha, ETTech reports. The January order also said that voter rolls must be displayed as an image as opposed to text. These changes were made to make it harder for people to access voters' personal information, and to frustrate attempts at crawling this information automatically. "It has been decided that electoral rolls should be published on (the) website in image PDF only. If presently-available PDF electoral rolls are not image PDF, then the same shall be done immediately," ET quoted the circular as saying. Improving privacy Om Prakash Rawat, India's Chief Election Commissioner, said that these steps were taken in the wake of Facebook's Cambridge Analytica controversy, where many users' data was shared without explicit consent and used for election ad targeting. Rawat told ETTech that the combination of no longer storing this information in machine-readable text, and putting it behind a captcha, would "protect voters’ data from data harvesting and data manipulation". Captchas prevent people from accessing webpages that are not supposed to be accessed by automated bots. For example, a website may want to protect against automated user logins by generating a random unique code every single time that a human has to type in. Image PDFs prevent automated extraction and processing of data directly. MediaNama's take: will this work? When MediaNama tried to access the voter rolls in Delhi, the captcha was a static set of…
