For three months starting December 2019, Omidyar Network India funded a radio show called Zindagi Mobile (“mobile life”), in which famous radio storyteller Neelesh Mishra weaved privacy into fictitious everyday stories of ordinary Indians. The show was translated into five regional languages and had a cumulative reach of 140 million over 10 episodes. Multiple episodes reached the #1 position on radio in major cities. In December 2020, we funded a behavioral evaluation of the program and found that it had a significant impact on knowledge, attitudes and practices towards data privacy.
In this session, I will present findings from the evaluation, while also explaining behavioural science underpinnings of those results. I will also talk about other behaviour-change initiatives that Omidyar Network India has funded, from an influencer-led social media campaign, to a grassroots NGO-driven movement. I will be available for office hours and will share documents offline.
This session has three objectives-
1) To share with the MozFest community lessons from Omidyar Network India’s large-scale #ResponsibleTech behaviour-change experiments, so that they can evaluate whether some of these are relevant to their communities
2) To catalyse a conversation about how discussions about the future of technology can be made more mainstream, and vulnerable communities like women and the elderly can be given a voice
3) To get the community’s feedback on our work, so that we can include them in the next set of experiments that we are about to launch
We're hoping that many efforts and discussions will continue after Mozfest. Share any ideas you already have for how to continue the work from your session.:Here are a few ideas to keep the conversation going:
- An email distribution list where we can share behavioural research on privacy from across the globe
- Our partners at Busara Centre for Behavioral Economics and Centre for Social and Behavior Change can invite participants to privacy-related events
- We can invite participants to join events related to other behaviour-change efforts that ON India is funding
- Participants can also follow us on social media, where we frequently post about the work that we do
Since this is a skill share session, we will make ourselves available to answer questions during the office hours. We can draw in as many people involved in the project as required.
Subhashish is Principal at Omidyar Network India and funds ideas that help make technology inclusive, private and transparent. A Rhodes Scholar, Subhashish received an M.Phil. in economics from Oxford.