The National Digital Health Mission’s Strategy Overview outlines India’s plan to become a Digital Health Nation, leveraging the nascent state of healthcare digitization to learn from other countries and avoid their mistakes. The strategy involves adapting India’s data portability architecture, using the Data Empowerment and Protection Architecture (DEPA) for healthcare data sharing. It proposes a radically-federated design, storing healthcare data at its generation point and enabling rapid data transfer across the health system.

The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) is considering reviving a proposal to limit transactions per entity in the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) ecosystem to prevent market dominance by a few players. Currently, three major players dominate the market, with two accounting for 77% of transactions. The NPCI aims to mitigate systemic risks and promote competition. There are alternative measures like leveling the playing field, regulating data control, and allowing more participants, rather than imposing transaction limits, to ensure a diverse and competitive UPI ecosystem.

The European Court of Justice’s ruling on the US-EU Privacy Shield, impacts global data transfer practices. This decision, highlighting the importance of local laws in data protection, may lead to increased data localization, affecting countries like India and beyond, potentially restricting European data within Europe’s borders.

India will need to remain non-aligned as it did during the Cold War unless it ups its game and becomes the third force in the two way battle. In the new tech cold war between US and China, India cannot remain non-aligned.

The first draft report of India’s Non-Personal Data Committee suggests democratizing data and introducing a new category of data principal - the community. However, absent guidelines for data trusts, the potential risks of politicization and favoritism within community action groups could result in potential misuse.

The article “The Right to Privacy” by Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis, published in 1890, has been influential in shaping modern privacy law. This foundational work has indirectly contributed to securing protections for the LGBTQ+ community, including influencing decisions that decriminalized homosexuality in the U.S. and India. But recent scholarship suggests that Warren’s motivation for writing the article may not have been what we thought it was.

The pandemic’s shift to online education highlights social inequities, as not all students have equal internet access. Asynchronous learning, unlike the current synchronous virtual classrooms, offers a solution by allowing students to learn at their own pace and access materials offline, potentially making education more inclusive and adaptable to individual needs.

In 2011, a biology book was listed on Amazon for $1.7 million, eventually reaching $23 million due to two sellers’ algorithms reacting to each other’s pricing. This incident underscores the challenges and potential regulatory issues as businesses increasingly rely on algorithms. It has gained attention in legal contexts, including Indian courts, where cases challenge the legality of pricing algorithms used by ride-hailing companies.

As countries grapple with COVID-19’s community spread phase, the focus has shifted to frequent testing. It is time to consider the potential use of health and immunity passports. These passports could become essential for travel and social activities, but at the same time give rise to a greater risk of deepening social divides and creating new forms of privilege.

Covid forced courts to adapt to remote working. And they did remarkably well considering the extent to which court processes rely on physical interactions. We need to use this opportunity to radically re-imagine dispute resolution. We can move to written advocacy, use artificial intelligence to make better decisions about litigation strategy - such as the chance of success of an appeal.