

Senses prevail: India's Voter Database will not be gifted to Google - shireeshj
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/ec-aborts-tie-up-with-google-over-security-concerns/articleshow/28596375.cms

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neil_s
Am I the only one who thinks this is a step backwards? Electoral Roll data is
already publicly available on EC websites, with probably worse data security
and privacy procedures than anything Google would implement. Anyone who has
seen one of the Indian government's 90's era websites, half of which are
regularly defaced by 'hackers', and the other half blinding you with blink
tags and marquees, should have been looking forward to something designed my
competent people.

Rather than derail the procedure completely, they should have negotiated on
having systems completely based in India with hardened outwards-facing
security.

This is all coming from a CS student who recently came of voting age and wants
to participate in the democratic process but has so far been completely put
off by how wasted his efforts have been, and how hard it has been to get
anything done (like get the correct spelling of my name on the roll).

~~~
sequence7
Can you point me to where Electoral Roll data is already publicly available on
EC websites?

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shireeshj
India's Election Commission, a constitutional body responsible for conducting
free and fair elections in the country, has finally heard the concerns of the
citizens and has called off its plans to use google to help voters locate
polling stations. In the guise of providing this as a social service, Google
was trying to get the demographic data of the entire population of India
directly from the government. What was that again? "Dont be evil"? yeh! right.

~~~
awk23
_The EC said Google had proposed to provide electoral look up services for
citizens to help in Commission 's efforts for better electoral information
services._

What's wrong with that?

Are you affiliated with any of the local companies lobbying to get that
contract instead?

~~~
shireeshj
Use google to find that... :)

Why isn't google proposing something like this to US government? Their
election system sucks - remember how George Bush got his second term?

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ankitml
Why are they even asking for it.It is in the public domain.
[http://eci.nic.in/eci_main1/Linkto_erollpdf.aspx](http://eci.nic.in/eci_main1/Linkto_erollpdf.aspx)
Some of them might be in the local languages, I am sure google can parse those
pdfs.

