 It is an enormous pleasure to introduce Nikaad Bada, in some ways she doesn't need any introduction since she's already quite well known to our community and to many of you individually. But by agreement between us, I'm going to tell you a little bit of the stuff that maybe she wouldn't say herself. She's a formidable activist who, as you know, founded the Digital Rights Foundation in Lahore, Pakistan. She does work on behalf of many people being harassed online. Unfortunately, that's also on behalf of herself and also fights bravely and tirelessly for digital rights, including privacy. I'd like to tell you just a minute or two about how she got into this. She comes from a small village in Punjab whose name is Ratamata. We're still working on the pronunciation, as you can tell. Her parents had no formal education and that is a cultural environment in which you would not expect a woman to go to college, to go to law school, to go on to founded an organization, to do pioneering work in human rights, or even to have red, green and other colors. In other words, she is blazing trails of all kinds, encouraged very strongly by both of her parents, including her dad, who, Nygat has told me, used to make a point of being in the middle of the village outside, speaking on his mobile to Nygat when she was traveling somewhere beginning her career as a digital rights campaigner, so that other people in the village would understand what it was that his daughter was doing and also that he was tremendously proud of her. So I would like to just kind of, unfortunately they are no longer with us in body, but I would like to just welcome them in spirit even as we welcome Nygat, who I'm very grateful to say is my friend and colleague. Thank you so much. This is a very kind introduction. I'm sure they must be very proud of their and smiling that I'm talking in Harvard today at Berkman Center. That was one of their dreams to see their children in one of the prestigious universities in the world, and I'm sure they never thought that I could ever make it to Harvard. But thank you so much for having me here and inviting me to talk about the issue of online harassment, which is basically a global issue. We at the Digital Rights Foundation, among other things, have been trying to address online violence against women, especially from a very difficult context of Pakistan where religion plays a very important role in every aspect of our lives and where the society has very deep-rooted patriarchal norms. And when I started working on online harassment against women and vulnerable communities in Pakistan, I found that it's not just specific to Pakistan, but it's a global issue. However, there are few things that make it more complex than the rest of the jurisdictions across the world. And when I started looking into it, I felt that lots of women, when they face harassment online, first of all, it's so hard for women to get online. It's just like access to technology is just a man thing, and women are mostly, especially in the conservative parts of Pakistan, are not allowed to access social media or online spaces just because it's not something that is appropriate for them, according to what society thinks or sometimes the conservative families. But then when women try to access these online spaces and they face harassment, they just cannot talk about it because most of the time in conservative parts or in far-flung areas, their families don't know about this, that they are online or they are using mobile phones. It's sometimes they are concealing that they are using mobile phones. And that's why I make it so hard for them to talk about the harassment or violence that they face, whether it be stalking, blackmailing, rape threats, death threats. But in recent years, I found that lots of women and vulnerable communities found this courage to talk about the issue. That's where the government of Pakistan actually introduced this legislation called Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act 2016, which is a very draconian act to be very honest. It's a very bad law. However, as it is happening especially in Global South, that whenever countries like Pakistan make these kind of problematic legislation, they make it in the name of protecting women. So we need to protect women and daughters and sisters because of the abuse that they are facing in the public space or in the online space. And that's where they made this law. Although the law is very, very problematic, it is giving massive powers to different authorities in Pakistan to surveil people, to monitor them, to control the narrative online in the name of banning unlawful content, in the name of banning immoral and obscene content. I mean, these are the words that they have used. But the main narrative is that we need to protect women in Pakistan. So they made this legislation. Section 20 of this law basically talks about the offences against dignity of a natural person, which is a criminal defamation, very, very problematic language. Section 24 talks about cyber-stalking, very ambiguous language. But still these are the provisions which sort of give some legal remedy to the people who face harassment online. Online harassment in Pakistan can turn deadly. So that's where I was saying that the patriarchal norms are so deep-rooted. For instance, I'll go to this case study where this woman, her name is Kandil Balosh. And she was the first social media celebrity in Pakistan in terms of reclaiming online space and reclaiming her sexuality very openly. And this is very rare when it comes to a Muslim society. And she was being killed in the name of honour. And how it happened, she was actually reclaiming her right to anonymity, which is so rare and Pakistan people even don't understand what anonymity is. She was using her pseudo-name online, got so much popularity, and people were going to her page. Some of the men were watching her videos and then abusing her, which is so ironic. And she had been facing death threats and rape threats. And somehow one of the journalists actually found her real identity and got access to her national ID card and they made it public online. And when they made it public, it went viral, it was picked up by the mainstream media. They did shows on her and then they basically shamed her so much that this woman belongs to this small village, belongs to this very respectable tribal area called Baloch. She is basically defaming this tribe and the things that she is doing is not something that a respectable woman should do online. And this led to her murder because her family felt that she is actually risking the honor of the tribe and when she was visiting her family, her brother killed her in the name of honor. The case is still going on, didn't go anywhere. But that's basically the reality where if women wants to, if they want to reclaim online spaces the way they want to, they are always being threatened. After Kandil murder, there are group of feminist and collectives and young feminist who started condemning her murder and they faced a lot of threats from different people online who were very upset that why these women are condemning her murder because this woman doesn't even deserve that. She was ashamed to the society. So these young feminists who are resisting the narrative of her being shamed, they also deserve rape threats and they are also bad women. So a lot of harassment happened during that time after her murder and I used to get a lot of complaints about cyber harassment as an individual and working at a digital rights foundation but during that time it increased so much that I also started burning out and we thought there should be something where people can actually reach out to us and there should be some mechanism around where we can actually have data about these complaints and stuff and in December 2016 we started a cyber harassment helpline in Pakistan. We didn't have money, we just had a small grant which was $5,000 and we thought that we really need to do something otherwise we will burn out, we won't be able to respond to people and the situation is getting worse and we should see how we can respond to the complaints that we are getting. So we started the helpline and in the meantime I also won the Dutch Humorized Tulip Award which came with a good money which was around 100,000 euros. So we can sustain the helpline for another year and I thought that we will be getting complaints, cyber harassment complaints, maybe 10 or 15s once a week but when we started the helpline it was 15 to 20 calls per day and the helpline is not 24-7, it's Monday to Friday from 9am to 5pm. We also thought that we will be getting complaints from women mostly because that's what I have been getting before starting the helpline but when we see the figures it's 253 calls were by a woman and 151 calls by men and this is when it comes to our society and this is kind of a really rare thing where men also reach out for these services because in patriarchal society it's very hard where women can where men talk about the violence that they face and it's also they feel shame that they are facing harassment and they are talking about it so they cannot talk about this in public I think one aspect of getting so many complaints from men was that the harassment helpline is anonymous so I think this also makes it easy for the people to just call the helpline and get support and among this 151 male callers there were men who actually got support from them but also calling on the behalf of the women in their families and on the behalf of their female friends who were hesitant to reach out to the helpline so this was also a good trend to see that there are male members in the family and around women who are also providing this support supporting mechanism to them so at the helpline we basically provide digital security support I think this is really a good thing at the helpline because I myself as a digital security trainer have been reaching out to people and giving these trainings where in one training we just cover around maybe 12, 15, 20 people but at the helpline it's like people are reaching out to us and it's like general awareness raising about the digital security and safety we also provide legal support so we do not give them legal aid in terms of like fighting their cases in the courts or something but just to tell them that what the law says what kind of legal remedies they have how the law enforcement which is federal investigation agencies cybercrime wing works and letting them know about the entire process of reporting and then the trial and stuff and then psychological counseling we have seen it's most of the time when we get complaints about women or men or whosoever they face a lot of emotional trauma and this is where most of the time organizations or even helplines in Pakistan they hardly address this issue or actually see it as an issue so this is also we have a counsellor who also provides this counselling at the helpline and then there are referral mechanisms so existing helplines in Pakistan we are reaching out to them sometimes there are complaints around domestic violence that we receive so we refer it to the helpline which deals with the domestic violence and the other helplines like emotional trauma helpline and the cybercrime wing helpline as well so coordination with law enforcement agencies and coordination with social media companies so these are both of the things that I think after the we actually release the report five months we just release the report of our five months progress and I'll show you the figures in next slide but things that we identified were also very useful for the law enforcement agency we reached out to them the report made it to the mainstream media and lots of people at the mainstream media and online platforms basically they actually talked about it and law enforcement reached out to us saying the things that you have identified is very helpful and we'll be seeing that how we can incorporate and fill those gaps and these are the nature of complaints that we have received 101 complaints were of fake profiles on Facebook and then there are other forms of harassment that we sort of mentioned here in which hacking, unsolicited blackmailing, info seeking which is like general information where people just call and get general information and federal investigation related complaints non-consensual use of images, online stalking gender based bullying doxing, threats, financial frauds, stalking all of these complaints that we have received so we sort of made a table and we found that 196 complaints were related to Facebook and it's because that lots of people who are using internet in Pakistan are mostly using Facebook yeah it's multiple, yeah so it's like multiple from multiple platforms yeah so the key challenges that we identified in our report also and during the four, five months of work at the helpline the law enforcement agency is basically under resourced there are 29 districts in Punjab I'm just talking about one province although we have four provinces and there are just nine investigation officers and it's like millions of population that they are dealing with right now at the cybercrime wing for the last one year there is no person who is leading who can lead the cybercrime wing at the law enforcement agency which shows it's the least priority at the law enforcement agency right now there are no standard operating procedures around privacy and data confidentiality for evidence submitted and this is one of the main reasons that we found people, especially women are hesitant to reach out to law enforcement because they have no assurance how their data will be treated how they will keep it safe what are the privacy mechanisms around and cybercrime wing offices are only in the main urban cities which are and then people who are living in rural areas or least developed areas they just cannot reach out to these offices because they have to appear in person and then they lodge the complaint there is a lot of victim blaming going on at the cybercrime wing and which also discourage women to reach out to them and other vulnerable communities lack of awareness among the law even among government and judges and inordinate delays so it's like the legislation which was enacted last year in the name of protecting women hardly protects any women since then and there is no understanding and the awareness about the law how it will be used judges are not really prepared even most of the time government officials people at the law enforcement lawyers, judges they really don't understand how the internet basically works and that's why there are so many delays in dealing with these cases so these are the key challenges that we are facing we have informed the law enforcement we have reached out to the Ministry of Information Technology and they said when we mentioned about the lack of data confidentiality they said we are going to work on data protection law in Pakistan we don't have any at the moment and we said alright that's good, that's where we reached out to the cyber law clinic here and we are actually right now working at the policy brief for the government and for the policy makers in Pakistan who are really really interested to have that brief with them and then they can actually advocate around that very good moment at the moment where the cyber harassment helpline it's a very local solution to be very honest might not work for everyone who is actually dealing or addressing this issue in different countries but I think it was very important for us to sort of deal this issue at the very local level because I feel that online harassment it's a global issue but we need local solutions to address that and cyber harassment helpline was one of the solution and I felt that this experiment is so far very it's very successful for us so many complaints people are reaching out, they are speaking up men are reaching out which is so rare in Pakistani society and then lots of gaps that we are identifying is actually opening up lots of solutions also and then reaching out to people like cyber law clinic here or a Berkman center and I'm so I'm glad and I'm honored that I had this access to the Berkman center and I could reach out to people but I think that's the moment is so great right now where we can actually push for good legislations in Pakistan and address the issues at the law enforcement agencies. Thank you. I started with a small question on this fantastic talk in the last slide in which you give the DRF's twitter and email and then it says contact us but the cyber helpline is a phone number. Why is that? Why don't you want people to email or tweet you can you explain? Yeah so I think I said that this is a very local solution and in Pakistani context toll free helplines have been working very like they are being very effective. Using facebook is one thing but using emails is something that people really don't know and they don't care about and then they would like to not to talk to anyone instead of writing an email and ask for help and it's also a culture where people can just dial a number and can talk to someone you know to a human voice and ask for solution. So that's why I said that helpline I thought it's a very local solution but it's working well for us. So you've really done what you know people will feel most competitive in order to implement this thing and then just to follow up what sort of data are you collecting from the people who call and is there anything that you don't know? So it's very voluntary we don't ask their name, we don't ask the place, we don't ask any information because we call ourselves anonymous helpline and if it's voluntary if they want to tell us that I'm this and I belong to this community or I'm calling from this city or this place then we sort of note it down but we are not sure whether it's true yeah and I think that's and I think it's also a word of mouth where you know people who have already reached out to us they tell other people that it's anonymous nobody's going to judge you and you can call and get help and that's why we receive lots of complaints by man Have you been able to reach all parts of the country including the parts that the Taliban runs the local governments? So I'm not sure if we still have those parts where Taliban are there maybe they are there but yes we actually reached out to those parts of the country through local journalists so they actually wrote about the helpline in their own regional languages in the local papers we appeared in different TV shows as well because that was a big deal in Pakistan having a helpline addressing online harassment issue so I think that was another channel of promoting the work that we are doing and asking people to reach out to us and that's why we are getting calls from a very conservative part of Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkha and then cities like Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad So the call that I was mentioning to you the other day it was from Balochistan and Balochistan is a very tribal sort of area and it's a conflict zone, conservative people don't reach out for help we got a call from a man who was actually seeking help for her sister and that was a big deal for us because he said that I don't want the man in my family to kill my sister and she is facing blackmailing from a man who has her nudes and he said that I want to save her so I need your advice how I'm going to do this, how I should reach out to law enforcement, how I'm going to report this and he was actually saving her sister and sister didn't have the courage to actually call us to talk to anyone and I found it really great that a brother was actually supporting whereas we had this Kandeel's case where the brother murdered her sister so these are the cases that are really of urgent nature and sensitive we reached out to facebook if the pictures are on facebook and facebook sort of deal with it very quickly but we also have the regional offices of cyber crime wing we have people who really support us and they keep the things anonymous so in cases where they feel that there is a risk of honor killing or if somebody can be killed by her family or something like that so they treat that issue very sensitively I have two questions how do people find you and the other question is are there any risks to you and your organization from doing this kind of activity and providing this kind of support so how people find us is we do a lot of promotion of the helpline I won't call it a promotion but it walks around the helpline so especially reaching out to different referral systems I said that we are working with existing helplines so what happens that if there is a case of online harassment or online violence these helplines tell them that you should call to the cyber harassment helpline this is the number these are the services that they provide time to time we come on radio shows and talk about the helpline sometimes tv shows invite us so it's like a global national tv channels where we get some airtime and we talk about so that's how we are reaching out to the people on facebook and that's where we get a lot of people get a lot of detail about us and then they call us yes we have risks now because it happened just one time but we got a call from this person who said I am reporting to you a blasphemy content and blasphemy is a very sensitive vision in Pakistan we have a blasphemy law if somebody says anything against prophet or Islam or holy book he or she can be punished under that law and the punishment is death penalty not less than that so this person called us and he said that I found blasphemy content on facebook so would you please remove that and we said no we don't do this you can report it to Pakistan telecommunication authority he said he was very upset at us and he was like what kind of harassment helpline you have I am being offended by this blasphemy content and what kind of helpline you guys are running so he was a bit upset on us but I found that there are people who doesn't like it why the helpline is giving voice to women especially the people who are perpetrators but I think it's just a very small number who are not happy with the work even at the law enforcement although they don't like me because I am a huge critique of their policies but still they like the work of the helpline so we got a huge support from the law enforcement and also from the people I have two questions the first one is about the law and the legal provisions because we have this same problem in Kenya where a lot of women suffer online harassment but when we made a law that was not specific to women it was misused by the elite to harass bloggers and have them prosecuted so my question would be what do you think is a good compromise for a law so that it protects victims and is not misused by you know people who are not who do not need protection of the law and then the second question I have is about the justice system we have a lot of cases again in East Africa where a lot of these harassment cases they are taken to the police and then at some point a negotiation is made with the family from outside the system and in serious cases where even it could have gone from online to offline and maybe even rape goats are paid and money is exchanged and the families decide not to pursue the matter so I do not know whether you have that kind of going back to some traditional systems and how this is dealt with so as I said the law is very problematic I do not support that law and the provisions that I said that can give legal remedy to the woman or the vulnerable communities against the online harassment that they face can also be misused against the progressives, liberals or bloggers and that has been happening across the world I have seen the same trend in Bangladesh and in other countries as well we are still hoping that the jurisprudence that will develop in the courts maybe define some processes and some limitations to that however I am really not that hopeful because I mean we have the judiciary who has been saying that Facebook should be banned because they say they will and they banned YouTube for three years in Pakistan so you know when you have such kind of judicial system then you know my hopes are really not high and the law is really problematic one of the solution that we provided to the leg we actually gave this recommendation to the government that the existing legislation can be used and maybe small little amendments in May for instance there is this provision already which says a lot about if anyone will hurt a modesty of woman or a sexual person he or she will be punished by this and this you know so it is already there in our Pakistan penal code and we said you can amend that provision and integrate the online part but you know which clearly shows the intention of the government that they really wanted to bring such a bad legislation because they wanted control over internet in the name of protecting women so they didn't agree to the suggestions that we gave and made this new legislation yes the problem is there and we are waiting how the courts will develop the jurisprudence and the second question is that yes there are traditional ways so I spoke to someone at the federal investigation agency who actually said that 90% of cases that we receive on online harassment are being settled outside the court that's where the victim family don't want to go into the court they don't want it the judicial system is so broken the justice system is so broken in Pakistan that it takes years and years to deal with one case and need lots of resources so they would rather find it easy to settle the case outside the court and that's what is happening so using a lot of traditional methods which are also by the way encouraged by the law enforcement as well because it also lessens their burden fighting the case in the court and the victim I know groups in Brazil that also try to set up health lines to be able to troll the men that were practicing harassment put together and made several calls like reporting fake abuses and like in a strategic way to dismantle the service so it didn't work in Brazil didn't you suffered like or trolling stuff no I mean you know this is very this is interesting that we haven't even received a one single prank call yeah and this is a very good sign there are other health lines in Pakistan we have spoken to them before starting our health line they said that be ready for you know fake calls and where people will really bug you and we thought that we will be getting a lot of you know these kind of calls but we didn't get a single call which is surprising and also a good sign thank you for this presentation and also thank you for all the work that you've done because I think foundations work that was most inspiring to the Mexican collective working on basically response to harassment and thinking like the different pathways that we could take to provide services in Mexico and so one of the things that we like every single group in the world doing this kind of work really struggled with or continue to struggle with is inconsistency in dealing with online service providers and so without saying names or saying what company who said what it just seems to like come down to like who your contact is and whether they woke up in a good mood or they didn't that day and and that's it there's not much that can be done but I wanted to ask like what will be those conversations take shape for you all how did you plan things out what do you feel you succeeded in what do you think you just tried didn't succeed in the hard part is actually dealing with the social media companies and make them understand that their community guidelines or the way they are responding to different complaints are really problematic and not working for different contexts I think our helpline not only identified gaps in the functioning of law enforcement in Pakistan but also how these social media companies are responding to the victims and in one of the slides it says that we received a large number of complaints came from the Facebook so that's where we reached out to the Facebook we actually shared our report with them and they said we really want to work with you guys and see how we can but you know it's been happening for a while in all the internet freedom festivals and digital rights conferences these companies are there every single time we talk about the same issue every single time they respond similarly that we are looking into it and very soon we'll come we'll come up with the new stuff at the social media company but I feel it will take really a long time honestly I'm not sure if we will succeed but at least you know small little successes for instance the translation of community guidelines in Urdu Sindhi Balo Chi Punjabi and that's huge for us because in one of the cases we found that because Facebook didn't understand the violence happening in Pashto language they didn't take down the page and when we told them that you know you really need to see that you know this is a violence and this is happening in a local context in a local language and that's where they found that you know yeah it is violence and they translated it and that's where they decided to you know translate the community guidelines in Urdu and also build their capacity in understanding at least the languages that are speaking in Pakistan and Pakistani context is a bit unique and different as I said religion plays out a huge role and the social norms and the kind of you know laws that we have like blasphemy so you know it's really it's a difficult task but still you know like we are working with them and see what we can come up with. It sounds as if you're saying that translation has to happen in both directions in other words that the social media company must understand content in regional languages in a country like Pashto and then also that the community guidelines need to be translated into various languages so that people who are using platforms can understand those rules. Yes that's what I meant. And then a follow up on what you said about the particularities of Pakistan which of course are numerous and every country has particular cultural context you mentioned blasphemy and there's been a terrible recent case of a killing related to content online and related to blasphemy in which someone posted content that would be completely innocuous in many other cultures like the identification of oneself as a humanist. Is that right and can you describe that case a little bit for the way in which it might shed light on these questions? Yeah so recently just a month ago a university student named Mashal Khan and Mashal means torch. He was killed in the name of online blasphemy by his fellow students and he was lynched till death. What happened was I actually had a slide about him and I just took it down it was a bit still very hard for me to talk about this issue but he had a Facebook page the Facebook page name was Voice of the Voiceless he was only talking about human rights and women's rights and animal rights and he identified himself as a humanist and some of the people so a couple of months back he posted on Twitter saying please beware somebody has made my fake profile and spreading false things about me and pretending that I'm saying these things so just he warned his friends about that So that was a profile on Facebook? That was a profile on Facebook and then we just found that this guy was lynched and that's where all these investigations took place and I'm sorry I'm just trying to be articulated in this but I think one of the major role that the fake profiles are playing out it's massive and very dangerous in the context of Pakistan where people are making fake profiles spreading blasphemous content and because of lack of understanding that this is a fake profile or a real profile people just rile up and the culture of mob lynching people call it mob justice in Pakistan I don't call it justice because it doesn't serve any justice as lynching and they should call it lynching and these group of students just on the basis of those fake profiles to settle personal score misusing blasphemy law is so easy there is no forensic lab one lab in Pakistan doesn't work really well lack of understanding of how online platforms work all of these things sort of you know made it possible and led to his murder and yeah and and the same students who were lynching him making videos so that's how we all of us got to know that this student was killed by his fellow students I saw one multiple videos still online very went viral I saw one video video I wanted to see it was very hard but I wanted to see that how it happened this guy was kicking him and then come back and making video then he stopped his video went and kicked him and he was shot by one of the student in his head and they were like kicking his body and punching him and throwing stones and and that made me realize that the online world is so it's very brutal and these same students actually posted the video online it went viral on Facebook it went viral online and and through those videos law enforcement basically identified people and they are some of them are arrested but last time online is now playing a huge role in terms of prosecuting people under the same legislation while misusing that law and online platforms I think has provided this space to misuse this law I don't know I don't want to blame because our social media is a tool and it's us who use it positively or negatively but it's actually the lack of understanding of the law enforcement and the law which is problematic yeah I mean this what happened just recently and it started it actually gets started it helped us starting a debate around the legislation not only the legislation but also awareness about you know about the online safety and security just like really basic things about strong passwords keeping an eye on fake profiles and this awareness is not there especially in Pakistan internet users they are on Facebook they are on different social media companies but they have very little understanding of how this works and how they can stay safe online what about the platforms I understand that a profile is fake and also dangerous if it posts what would be considered blasphemous content in Pakistan I think they do understand because they have a they have a team in India who actually understand the context of Pakistan I also you know always reach out to them and tell this is happening you know this is what the law says what the people are doing so you just be vigilant just to let them know that they don't give any excuse that oh we don't know we don't know the context and we have this global standard I'm not asking them to give an exclusive solution to Pakistan but I think there are several contexts which are similar a blogger was just killed in Maldives because what he was posting online so these are the trends that are happening especially in the Muslim countries so I think social media companies are aware maybe they just pretend that they are not and what I do is that I always inform these companies that this is what is happening this is the context and you know please be vigilant and be warned one of your hopes for the new data privacy legislation in that it might increase the confidence of people reporting these types of incidents to police because they could be more confident that their information would be treated securely what are your other hopes for what that data privacy legislation might do I think it's not it's just one small example that I said that it'll help you know the cyber cybercrime wing but I mean we have world's largest biometric database and we don't have any data protection you know policy regarding that database and it's just one example so we have this huge project around smart cities just in Lahore where I am based they are installing 8000 CCTV cameras but we don't really know how this will work how they will process the data who will have access to it so I think it'll help not only you know bringing a federal law but also you know the provincial laws and then these provincial laws will help you know the institutions to you know have their own data protection policies which are really not there so at least that's what I am hoping for but I think the conversation has started at the federal level and at the provincial level as well so in Pakistan under the constitution we not only need a federal law at the federal level but also you know provinces can make their own legislations and I am not only pushing at the federal level but also pushing the Punjab government and sometimes you know these provinces sort of do stuff in the competition of you know other local governments and that's what you know we are sort of hoping that if Punjab will only you know enact a legislation around data protection it'll set a good precedent for the rest of the provinces you know the federal government to do the same but federal government is already you know interested in you know having enacting the legislation so so this will help at different levels yeah you said you had around 500 calls in the first year that you had this help line up 4 months excuse me 4 months so then just wondering what is the context of like how many people you are helping given how much harassment you think actually takes place to practice any citizens on like so I guess like maybe not like on the whole in it let's just say Facebook for example so I think that's where our data also lacks sometimes you know someone is calling and asking us to to get the information around cyber crime wing or the processor or the legal remedy or how the law works so we tell them you know the entire information and that's what only they want so we really don't know that this is basically the solution of their problem or you know they just wanted that information sometimes you know if someone's profile is hacked or something we tell them the reporting mechanism if we get another call that means that it is not solved sometimes you know when it is solved people don't tell us that you know my problem is resolved so that's where we are lacking the data that how many you know reports or how many complaints we have resolved so far yeah so yeah I was just in India and I was talking a lot with people about biometric the state of all the new biometrics and figuring out if there is any silver lining or upside I mean in a sense identity that should go down or impersonation or and some things like getting SIM cards are easier it's faster because the authentication is faster and I'm wondering if there is any when it works if there is any silver lining around like online authentication or impersonation talk about how biometrics might help stop these attacks or if we shouldn't even go there I don't think we should even go there that's really I mean we are I'm really worried about the kind of biometrics that are happening in Pakistan TV show few weeks back and there was this guy who said it's so easy to deal with cyber crimes and online harassment and fake profiles so if you sort of connect people's profile with their biometric identity this will help solving the problem and then you know nobody will make a fake profile and I was like okay no we don't need that I find it very problematic to be very honest I don't know how this will work but even just the idea and yeah sure we are doing advocacy to tech companies that they don't fall for this yeah oh that's a great way to authenticate people we use phone numbers now as like an ID yeah but you know that's also very problematic in terms of people who are having their like anonymous profiles and pseudo names for instance I mentioned a case of Kandil Baloch and you missed that part but she was using her pseudo name and that's how she was reclaiming her you know online space the time the moment her identity was revealed she was killed by her brother so I think online anonymity actually provides a lot of space for people to reclaim online spaces and if you know it will sort of be connected with the biometric profiles or also you know the real name policy of Facebook is really you know I mean they have it and it's worrying because lots of people for instance LGBT community in different parts of the world they just they cannot be there online with their real name and if somebody's profile is reported and you know take it down by the social media company they cannot take it back because they have to provide their real identity to to get their profile back so Alleri and then yeah I think so the um the impersonation challenge and Facebook and I mean I'm just continuing this topic what should we tell Facebook to do about that about the issue of impersonation because I mean right it's like the real name policy I mean they do you know asking for ID they do so that's kind of that's already there but um thinking about Michelle how might he or somebody on his behalf have what would I mean I've sort of been in this situation with the company and I don't know what I've never had like an interaction where I felt like oh they really helped figure that one out when it came to an account that seemed to be intending to impersonate someone I'm not sure I mean I think that's that's why we all are here to figure this out to be very honest and that's why I said that you know the helpline is a very very local solution might not work for others but that's how it's working for us maybe not fully but at least you know to some extent we are trying to address the issue but also you know like dealing with companies is such a complicated stuff honestly the whole argument around online harassment and all of these things I mean we need to we also need to understand why these companies are there you know they're what is their main job it's business right and making money out of our data so I was just curious if you've ever had a discussion about someone who works at Facebook or Twitter or something about a system that basically just federates tasks like this because actually two hours ago Max Zuckerberg he said that he's devoting 3,000 people more and up communication tasks so that they can filter and I think that's great so he's taking the torch on this one but still 3,000 for billions of people just doesn't work so I was thinking something kind of a Wikipedia style federated bunch of editors who do the work globally that is not efficient but it's a lot more efficient than just relying on a company that has to pay 3,000 people to do it and they might not like it might not be equipped to do it if they hire them just in one country so I was just curious if you thought about this kind of global I mean it's not easy to do but just if you know if the idea is around if someone is discussing it or I don't know I haven't discussed this kind of stuff with Facebook I'm also kind of slightly reluctant in you know talking so much with the companies yeah but but I have heard that they have this whole whole system in somewhere in Philippines where you know people are actually working for Facebook to identify fake news something around that to review reports that come from users which are of course enormous in number and to make a decision whether to take content down or Facebook already employs like the other platforms enormous numbers of people who do that yeah but it's also worrying that the people who are working in Philippines I mean do they really understand the context coming from across the world honestly I think it's a huge challenge for the companies as well it's not just something that they will just provide the solution they are dealing with these issues and there are people in these companies who really want to address but also I think the larger political will is needed at the higher level have some kind of federated system that does it I don't know what the system will look like but I'm curious if someone is talking about it has been a tremendous conversation we have not solved all of the problems as yet but you've heard about some very courageous and innovative efforts to make some progress and I'm very grateful that NiGOT has come and hope that these conversations and efforts will only multiply and continue and be more and more effective so thank you so much there's probably more lunch