Privacy and the Information Society in Asia: International Development Research Centre

Project Leader: Gus Hosein

Region: Asia

Areas of Impact: Hong Kong, Malaysia, Thailand, Philippines, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and India

Start Date: March 1, 2010

Project Details

Context: Why is this project important?

Privacy is increasingly the central focus of global policy fora. The Madrid Declaration, Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) and the Internet Governance Forum, where discussions around privacy issues dominated proceedings, are recent examples of this rise in concern around privacy vis a vis technological and societal changes sparked by social networking, cloud computing and trans-border outsourcing.

Privacy rights are, however, often not well understood and the subject of much debate. At the same time, global prerogatives around security and terrorism, as well as the claimed need for unfettered access to data to improve business opportunities, have been eroding privacy rights in Asia. Indeed, privacy and security are almost always presented as mutually exclusive principles that require trade-offs. However, recent thinking on these issues have suggested that privacy may be a means to ensure greater security for governments and could even lead to more business opportunities through ensuring trust in new applications. Certainly, the interplay between privacy rights, security concerns and business needs to be better understood.

The Project: How does this initiative address the development problem?

For a better understanding of privacy in Asia, this project aims to investigate privacy issues brought about by an increasingly networked society and its impact on the interactions between citizen, government, and the private sector. This project aims to also provide the necessary capacity and methodology for researchers and advocacy groups from the Asia region to identify gaps, incompatibilities and deficiencies in national legal regimes, in order to address policy change towards safeguarding privacy and human rights.

Objectives:

The main objective of the Digital Privacy in Asia (DPIA) project will be to conduct research, build capacity, and inform policy deliberations on privacy issues across eight developing countries in Asia. More specifically, the project aims to:

Develop research programs on privacy issues at the national and regional levels in Asia to reveal current and future gaps and policy problems that need to be considered;
Conduct analyses of the pressing policy issues relating to privacy in each country. Privacy International (PI) will provide expertise and advice to local civil society groups to facilitate their engagement in policy development, and identify opportunities for raising the profile of these issues;
Engage with national, regional, and international governmental bodies to promote research findings, enhance participation of national and regional stakeholders, and encourage authorities to use the resulting research to inform their policymaking by adopting privacy-respecting policies.

Development Impact:

The expected outcomes of the project are as follows:

Enhanced levels of information available on privacy issues in each country;
Policy stakeholders will have more knowledge and capacity to understand pressing and future problems;
More informed policies that are consistent with international best practice and compatible human rights;
Better understanding of the perceptions of privacy in Asian countries that will help inform global policy processes as well as debates about the universality of human and consumer rights.

Outputs: All publications and materials related to this project will be listed here as they become available.