 "Strike a balance between access to data and data theft")
For over two decades, Parry Aftab has been helping US schools and organisations to build safeguards against Cybercrime.
Now, the cyber lawyer who sits on the safety advisory board of Facebook and MTV, is helping set up a non-profit body in India to help educate school children and their parents battle cybercrime, a growing concern for lawmakers globally.
"There are no programmes that are existing here. You are for the first time in the world slamming a billion people with the newest technology that you are building and you don't even understand the risk," says Aftab, who also advises Interpol, the international police force.
For majority of India's billion mobile subscribers, a mobile and a smartphone is their first computing device. Increasingly, many of these first time users are also getting on the internet using their smartphones, making India the fastest growing internet market in the world.
The new user base is also becoming a target of cyber attackers, who create fake sites to steal personal data and money or sexual offenders who use Facebook to target unsuspecting young girls and blackmail them.
"Porn is a huge problem," says Aftab, who finds parents finding that their wards discover porn material accidentally while researching for school projects on the internet. “People who work with slum children say they see people using mobiles and downloading porn at a local store for as low as Rs 10,” she adds.
"There are solutions. How about teachers creating a whitelist of sites that students can use to do research for a physics project,” says the 65-year-old campaigner, who quit her high paying corporate law practice to take up this cause after she found a video of a little girl who was raped on the internet.
The non-profit body, to be managed by local funding, has a steering committee, which includes, among others, Oracle Chief Privacy Strategist Joseph Alhadeff, Verizon Country Head Harsh Marwa, cyber law expert Pawan Duggal, and IBM Director (government and regulatory affairs) Ameer Shahul.
Aftab has begun programmes in local schools in Delhi and Bengaluru, building awareness among children, sensitising teachers and parents on how to respond to and handle such criminal activities on the internet.
Fortunately, the awareness is higher among students in India, who collectively want to share common resources to tackle cybercrime. “Some of the questions they ask may have come from someone who I would talk to in MIT,” says Aftab, who runs cybersafety.org and WiredSafety in the US. “These kids thought it is cool to help others,” she added.
“Every single tip was about Facebook. Teens outside India are not using Facebook anymore, they are using instagram. You don't use instagram as much here, but you are on Whatsapp, which is owned by Facebook,” says Aftab.
