New Delhi: The premier Indian Institute Technology (IIT) and Indian Institute of Science (IISc), have criticised the social networking giant Facebook’s free basics initiative labelling it as “flawed” and “misleading”.
The scholars and the scientist have pointed three major flaws in the initiative.
“The first obvious flaw in the proposal is that Facebook assumes control of defining what a ‘basic’ service is. Facebook will have access to all your apps’ contents. This flaw is not visible to the lay person as it’s a technical detail, but it has deep and disturbing implications,” a joint statement from IITs (Bombay, Delhi, Kharagpur, Madras, Patna) and IISc Bengaluru said.
“Since Facebook can access un-encrypted contents of users’ ‘basic’ services, either we get to consider health apps to be not basic, or risk revealing health records of all Indians to Facebook. The third flaw is that the term ‘free’ in ‘ free basics’ is a marketing gimmick,” the Joint statement added.(ANI)