How is India governing personal data, AI systems, and content moderation?

Mauricio Figueroa is joined by Jhalak Kakkar, Divij Joshi and Krishna Deo Singh to discuss the evolution of privacy and technology law in India, the largest common law jurisdiction in the world, and the challenges presented by its unique approach to technology and governance.

The Panel:

Mauricio Figueroa in an early career researcher that has published peer-reviewed articles and book chapters on digital technology law; taught university courses on Contract Law, Introduction to Legal Theory, and Alternative Dispute Resolution; and currently the host of the SCL podcast "Privacy and Technology Laws Around the World".

Jhalak M. Kakkar is Executive Director at the Centre for Communication Governance at National Law University Delhi as well as a Visiting Professor at the National Law University Delhi. She leads the academic and policy research at CCG across pressing information law and policy issues such as data governance and privacy, platform regulation, governance of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and blockchain, and cybersecurity. She graduated with an LLM from Harvard Law School, Cambridge, USA on a Fulbright-Nehru Masters Fellowship. She has a five-year integrated social science and law degree from the National University of Juridical Sciences, Kolkata, India.

Divij Joshi is a lawyer and researcher studying the intersections of technology, regulation and society, based in London and India. Prior to joining UCL, he was a practicing lawyer at the offices of AZB & Partners in Mumbai, and a public policy professional. He has led and contributed to various research projects with Indian and international civil society, including a pioneering study of algorithmic accountability in the public sector, with the AI Now Institute, the Ada Lovelace Institute and the Open Government Partnership; research on information governance with the Centre for Law and Policy Research, the Centre for Internet and Society, and Vidhi Karnataka. He edits and contributes to SpicyIP, a world-leading legal resource with the mission of democratising debates around intellectual property law in India.

Krishna Deo Singh is an Indian-based scholar who works in the field of technology laws with a special focus on algorithmic nudging, algorithmic regulation, and a jurisprudential approach towards how technologies such as AI impact the nature of law and regulation. He has been a part of the Jean Monnet Chair at Jindal Global University. He is also pursuing his PhD at Jindal Global Law School, studying the regulation of AI powered personalized assistants in their role as choice architects. An author of several scholarly articles, his recent works explore the issues manipulation and nudging by AI systems, which include dark patterns, regulation of recommender systems etc. One of his forthcoming book chapters applies the philosophy of Advait Vedanta to potentially manipulative AI systems. Another paper has extensively explored the issue of ‘beneficence’ as an ethical principle in AI ethics and builds the argument that a far more clear and robust understanding of beneficence is not just a ‘good to have’ aspect of AI ethics, but in fact an essential feature, without which AI ethics remains disoriented.