As more and more facets of daily life get tied into digital media, the protection of one’s private data becomes even more critical. Yet harmful data practices continue to infiltrate online engagement. Keeping this in mind, we at Safer-I, organized a one-day data hygiene workshop at Khwopa Engineering College.
This workshop was conducted for girl students across the Computer Engineering and Electrical Engineering stream at Khwopa Engineering College, Bhaktapur. The participants represented all semesters and had varying experiences with social media, data consumption, and online engagement.
In order to highlight the unsafe data practices among emerging adults in Nepal, the Safer-I team first shared a short summary of their findings from their recent research titled ‘Deconstructing Online Privacy: Online User Engagement and Privacy Concerns on Social Media’.
In it, we highlighted how despite knowing the importance of reading terms and conditions or the importance of using encrypted apps, many emerging adults fail to do so. We focused on the significant problems that plague online engagement among emerging adults in Nepal including lack of readability and conciseness of existing terms and policies, lack of information about how cookies are collected and shared, and the lack of knowledge of digital rights.
We asked the participants how they defined data privacy in order to gauge their knowledge and concerns surrounding data privacy, data practices, and data rights. We also took a simple understanding of what their most used applications were.
Taking a more practical learning approach, our Program and Communications Officer, led our participants in examining and managing the app permissions on their phones. We also shared practices of identifying what websites are secure and what websites are not. One of the easiest ways to do so is by checking for the ‘lock’ sign before the URL of a particular website.
We also encouraged our participants to opt for encrypted apps like Signal, Telegram, and WhatsApp over non-encrypted messaging apps like Messenger and Instagram. Encryption is the process of adding an extra layer of protection over text messages sent such that the text can’t be easily accessed by other parties during transmission.
The second part of the workshop was led by Ms. Sadichchha Silwal from Digital Rights Nepal. She shared with our participants the legal perspective of data practices and digital rights in Nepal.
She highlighted the successes and failures of existing legal provisions regarding data privacy in Nepal. The major provisions that guide data privacy practices in Nepal are the current Constitution of Nepal, the Electronic Transaction Act, the Individual Privacy Act, the Civil Code, and the Criminal Code. These provisions set strict legal restrictions over practices like data manipulation, uninformed access to others’ digital devices/ content, online sexual harassment, and so on.
We believe that after attending this workshop, the participants were able to develop a legal perspective on digital rights along with gaining practical knowledge about the best data hygiene practices.
