Dear Gautam, thanks for the link - a discussion overdue.
After some discussion a few weeks back on this list, the ECI at least introduced rate limiting to electoralsearch.in (though probably for QoS reasons rather than privacy). Chhattisgarh is the only state with a CAPTCHA to prevent mass downloading, while Uttarakhand does not have the rolls online at all. Rolls for all other states are freely available, though there are some technical challenges in terms of extracting data from corrupted PDFs (but this CAN be done). While I am happy to be able to use electoral roll data for academic research, this commodification was exactly what I worried about from the beginning. Let's hope ECI changes its access policies soon - though arguably the damage is done, with an "almost population register" online for long enough for all to scrape and use. But then privacy laws that prohibit what is technically possible could at least limit damage. My five cents, Raphael On 19.05.2014 07:28, Snehashish Ghosh wrote: > Dear Gautam, > > Thank you. This is very interesting. I wrote a piece on this issue right > after the failed Google-ECI deal in February <http://goo.gl/e9Xea0> > The UK approach seems to be a good one. In UK there are two voter lists > - "full list" and "edited list". You can choose to be removed from the > edited list during the time of registration or at anytime thereafter. > The edited list is available in the public domain and the full list is > safeguarded by purpose limitation and UK Data Protection Law. > > ~Snehashish > > > On Mon, May 19, 2014 at 10:36 AM, Gautam John <gkj...@gmail.com > <mailto:gkj...@gmail.com>> wrote: > > Something I read today: > > http://www.medianama.com/2014/05/223-modak-marketing-election-voter-india/ > > -- > Datameet is a community of Data Science enthusiasts in India. Know > more about us by visiting http://datameet.org > --- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google > Groups "datameet" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, > send an email to datameet+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com > <mailto:datameet%2bunsubscr...@googlegroups.com>. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > > > -- > Datameet is a community of Data Science enthusiasts in India. Know more > about us by visiting http://datameet.org > --- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google > Groups "datameet" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send > an email to datameet+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com > <mailto:datameet+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com>. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- Raphael Susewind | BGHS Bielefeld University, CSASP University of Oxford Snail Mail | Melanchthonstr. 4a, 33615 Bielefeld, Germany Web & Twitter | http://www.raphael-susewind.de | @RaphaelSusewind Please do consider http://www.gnupg.org for encryption (key id A5ED49AE) -- Datameet is a community of Data Science enthusiasts in India. Know more about us by visiting http://datameet.org --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "datameet" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to datameet+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
