Also in this letter:
■ MeitY pulls down draft data anonymisation guidelines
■ Dunzo Daily’s Bengaluru operations hit as delivery staff protest
■ Google Play Store reverses policy on fantasy gaming, rummy apps in India
Govt finalises draft rules to counter fake reviews on ecommerce platforms
The government has finalised a draft framework of guidelines on how to counter fake reviews and unverified star ratings on ecommerce websites, and travel and hotel bookings platforms, Rohit Kumar Singh, secretary, Department of Consumer Affairs, said in an exclusive interview with ET’s podcast series, The Morning Brief.
He said the government is currently consulting with ecommerce firms to find consensus on the matter, adding that the guidelines would be released shortly.
“The main issue is traceability and legitimacy of the reviews and ratings — whether the person who’s written the review is actually the user. Hotels and travel reviews are the biggest defaulters on this,” Singh said.
The framework has been developed by the Department of Consumer Affairs (DoCA) over the past few months.
Why now? Ecommerce has boomed in India since the start of the pandemic. A report by Redseer Strategy Consultants said online sales during the festive season would hit $11.8 billion this year, a 28% increase over last year.
“This is the right time to address such issues because ecommerce prevalence has been increasing and more and more people are shopping online,” Singh said.
There’s more: He said the government is also looking to clamp down on product placement in movies. “I saw the movie Darlings on Netflix, and there were some 20 products placed there, which is a new surrogate way of advertising. This is a new challenge for us,” he said.
On existing guidelines on advertising to children, which look to clamp down on bullying, body shaming, and the promotion of junk food, Singh said these were “more in the form of deterrents”, and a set of officers were monitoring all platforms.
MeitY pulls down draft data anonymisation guidelines
The government has pulled down its draft guidelines on data anonymisation, the third instance of a set of draft rules being removed this year.
Catch up quick: The guidelines were put up for feedback by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) on August 30. We reported on September 2 that MeitY had invited public comments on the draft guidelines.
But sources now say the draft had been “released without adequate expert consultation.”
Data anonymisation is one of many privacy-enhancing techniques that removes or minimises identifiability of individuals in large data sets of personal information. It reduces risk, enables entities to process, share and publish data for various purposes, making it useful while optimising privacy.
After hosting it on its egovstandards website with muted notifications, MeitY has removed it completely, said Prateek Waghre, policy director, Internet Freedom Foundation.
Documents related to the consultation can no longer be found there. An archived version of the page confirms that the documents were previously listed on it.
Strike three: This is the third documented instance this year of a public consultation process being interrupted without notice or acknowledgment.
Previously, the proposed draft amendment to the IT Rules, 2021 and the draft India Data Accessibility & Use Policy, 2022 were similarly taken down.
Such actions reduce public trust in the policy consultation process and make it harder for interested stakeholders to meaningfully engage with the government, Waghre said.
Dunzo Daily’s Bengaluru operations hit as delivery staff protest
Reliance Retail-backed Dunzo has seen its quick commerce operations under Dunzo Daily come to a screeching halt in Bengaluru — its largest market — over the past two days as its delivery executives have gone on strike to protest changes to its delivery policy, sources said.
Dunzo Daily, the 20-minute delivery service, was still not available in many pockets of Bengaluru as of Thursday afternoon. A message on its app read: “Dunzo Daily will be back in a while.”
“Operations were severely hit for Dunzo Daily in the last two days after protests by delivery partners at Dunzo’s office premises in Bengaluru,” a person aware of the matter said. “It’s partially back up now in certain areas of Bengaluru,” this person added.
Why the strike? The company has started to push ‘batching of orders’ — meaning one delivery person is assigned multiple orders to service on a single trip. Dunzo has also made internal tech changes to how orders are assigned to delivery partners and how they will be picked, leading to further friction with the company.
We reported last month that Dunzo would push for order batching to reduce delivery costs and was looking to curb its spending after a season of hyper-growth in the first six months of the year. It is also incentivising users to choose longer (60-minute) delivery options.
ET Ecommerce Index
We’ve launched three indices – ET Ecommerce, ET Ecommerce Profitable, and ET Ecommerce Non-Profitable – to track the performance of recently listed tech firms. Here’s how they’ve fared so far.
Watch final day of ET Soonicorns Summit LIVE today
Watch the second and final day of the two-day virtual ET Soonicorns Summit today as we stream it LIVE on our virtual events platform and on the ET Soonicorns Summit website from 11:30 am onwards.
At Day 2 of ET Soonicorns Summit, powered by AWS and Intel, don’t miss the following sessions we have in store:
■ Opening Keynote by Anupam Mittal, Founder, People Group on ‘Igniting the culture of entrepreneurship and sparking change across India’
■ Investor Insights session with Sanjay Nath, Founder & Managing Director, Blume Ventures on ‘Reimagining startup financing for India’
■ Closing keynote panel with Prime Venture Partners’ Sanjay Swamy, Trifecta Capital’s Lavanya Ashok, BII’s Pankaj Makkar, and Amitabh Nagpal, Head of Startup Ecosystem, India (AWS), Amazon Internet Services
■ Unicorn Playbook session with Trivikraman Thampy, Co-Founder & Co-CEO, Games24x7
■ Sector roundtables with founders, investors, and enablers of startups in various industries, including SaaS, gametech, Web3, and deeptech
For an overview of the session lineup and key speakers, visit the ET Soonicorns Summit website or check out our virtual events platform.
Google Play Store reverses policy on fantasy gaming, rummy apps in India
Google said on Thursday it is conducting a pilot to allow the distribution of Indian-made daily fantasy sports (DFS) and rummy apps on the Play Store in India.
Currently, such apps – which include Dream11, Mobile Premier League and many others – are not available on the Play Store because they fall within the gambit of gambling.
The pilot is scheduled to run from September 28, 2022 to to September 28, 2023.
Process: The company said interested developers must fill in an application form to participate in the pilot and stage an app for review. “Participating developers must have requisite safeguards for a safe and secure user experience as provided in the pilot terms and conditions,” Google wrote in a blog post.
Conditions: In addition to all Google Play policies, DFS and rummy apps that are accepted will be subject to the terms of the pilot programme. This means they must not only comply with all local laws and regulations, but also own the required licences and permits, and have safeguards to ensure they are accessible only to users over the age of 18 who live in states where such games are not prohibited by law.
Google said that developers of such apps will also have to provide users with complaint redressal mechanisms and customer support. It added they cannot be paid apps or use Google Play’s in-app billing system.
TWEET OF THE DAY
Lido Learning files for bankruptcy as acquisition talks collapse
Edtech firm Lido Learning, which had been exploring a merger, has now initiated an insolvency and bankruptcy process as it struggles to pay its teachers and former employees.
Driving the news: The company’s board passed a resolution at a meeting on September 5 to file an application under Section 10 of the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code, according to company filings with the ministry of corporate affairs (MCA).
Buyout talks fall through: The company was in talks for a potential buyout by Reliance Industries, as first reported by The Morning Context in June. However, the talks did not fructify, according to a person aware of the discussions. “We would like to point out that the information that you have is not true. We deny having any interest in the compan,” a Reliance spokesperson told us.
Unpaid dues: The company went on to lay off close to 200 employees in February. It is yet to pay the January salaries of many sacked workers. According to a cross-section of teachers, some teachers at higher grades were retained and put on a two-week term break from the last week of August. An educator on the platform told us that teachers have not been paid salaries for the last two months. Further, some teachers who were asked to quit and not paid salaries, are contemplating legal action.
Founded in 2019 by Sahil Sheth, Lido Learning offered live online tuition to children from kindergarten to grade nine in subjects such as math, science, English, and coding. It catered to the Indian and Middle-Eastern markets.
Last September, the company announced a $10 million (about Rs 73.4 crore) raise from Ronnie Screwvala’s Unilazer Ventures, taking its overall funding to $20 million.
Twitter is testing a ‘share to WhatsApp’ button in India
Twitter said on Thursday it was replacing the share button for Android users with a WhatsApp share icon on an experimental basis to enable them to share tweets easily on the instant-messaging platform.
The service, which will be launched in India first, will be available to Twitter users on Android initially, and then be rolled out to other operating systems and countries based on the learnings from the experiment, the company said.
Edit button: The WhatsApp share button is the second product feature that the social network has launched in the past few days. On September 1, Twitter said it was testing an ‘edit’ button for tweets and would soon roll out the feature for Twitter Blue users.
The edit button will allow users to edit a published tweet within 30 minutes of posting it. Twitter said it would show the history of changes made to tweets so that readers were aware of the edits.
Other Top Stories by Our Reporters
Myntra to create over 16,000 festive season jobs this year: Myntra, the fashion arm of Flipkart, is creating over 16,000 jobs this festive season for roles in delivery, logistics and warehouse handling. Nupur Nagpal, the company’s chief human resource officer, told us that 10,000 of these jobs will be direct employment opportunities (including 1,000 in contact centres) and 6,000 indirect – its biggest hiring spree in any festive season so far. In the same period last year, the company hired 11,000 people, of which 7,000 were for direct jobs.
RBI deputy governor on digital lending rules: The recently released digital lending norms are designed to end regulatory arbitrage and protect customers, Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Deputy Governor M Rajeshwar Rao said on Thursday. Rao added that unbridled engagement of third parties, mis-selling, data privacy breaches, unethical recovery practices, and exorbitant interest rates led the RBI to regulate digital lending activities.
Wow! Momo Foods raises Rs 125 crore: Wow! Momo Foods has raised Rs 125 crore in funding from private equity fund Oaks Asset Management at a valuation of Rs 2,125 crore. The funding is a part of a two-tranche raise, with the second one being planned with another fund where Wow! Momo intends to raise Rs 100 crore.
Global Picks We Are Reading
■ This clever anti-censorship tool lets Russians read blocked news (Wired)
■ Google’s ‘News Showcase’ stalls in US as media outlets baulk at terms(WSJ)
■ Scooters and three-wheelers are really what’s driving an EV revolution (Rest of World)
