This is a special newsletter that went out to MediaNama subscribers on August 17, 2023. The Monsoon session of the Parliament has concluded and a lot has happened, apart from the Digital Personal Data Protection Bill, inside and outside the Parliament. Welcome to this month's edition of our Talking Points newsletter, where we bring you a curated list of things to think about in tech policy: topics you’d like to sit with, mull over, and discuss in your circle. Under India’s data protection law, AI may have legal backing to scrape users’ data [Vallari Sanzgiri] It is a well-known fact that AI companies largely rely on publicly available data to train their models. Conversations with chatbots like Google Bard have led to discovery that AI actively tries to scrape publicly available data on social media. What’s interesting is that while other countries like Italy, Canada, etc. are investigating AI for scraping data from the internet, India’s data protection law seems to have given free reign to these companies. And this sanction via the law matters because our aforementioned conversation with AI chatbots have shown that such technologies are keen on scraping data even when there are explicit regulations against this. What does this mean for India users’ privacy and copyright rights? Can the real ‘online game’ please stand up? [G. Aarathi] “What's in a name? That which we call a rose, by any other word would smell as sweet,” wrote William Shakespeare many moons ago. Those immortal lines are all…
