Using FOSS to fight for Digital Freedom

Speakers: Radhika Jhalani & Orendra Singh

Track: Community, diversity, local outreach and social context

Type: Long talk (45 minutes)

Room: Anamudi

Time: Sep 10 (Sun): 15:30

Duration: 0:45

This talk will focus on using Free Software to fight against digital authoritarianism. We live in a world where digital rights are slowly becoming human rights. There are tools which are needed to fight against this quick takeover of our digital lives. Example of this is the open-source website internetshutdowns.in which was created as an open-source tool and is perhaps the only real-time tracker of Internet shutdowns in the world. During COVID we saw, many governments coming up with contact tracking apps that would steal the data of citizens without any privacy-protecting ways. Open source mandates can really work to counter these.