Internet Freedom Foundation

The Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF) is a Delhi-based digital-rights organisation working on the privacy, free-speech, surveillance, and algorithmic-accountability implications of Indian state and corporate technology. It is the South Asia anchor that the make-AI-good corpus has previously lacked: the country's most sustained civil-society organisation specifically focused on facial-recognition deployment, biometric mass surveillance, automated-decision-making in welfare and identity systems, and algorithmic governance in Indian public services. Its self-description — launched on 15 August 2016, India's Independence Day, "to advance liberty, equality, fraternity and social justice in the digital age" — explicitly grounds its mandate in the Indian Constitution; its programme mix of digital-first public campaigning, strategic litigation in the higher judiciary, original investigative trackers, and policy advocacy in Parliament and the regulatory bodies has made it the principal Indian counterpart in the international civil-society response to live facial recognition and AI-driven surveillance.

Founding and structure

IFF was launched on 15 August 2016 by a group of eight co-founders — Apar Gupta, Aravind Sulekha, Karthik Balakrishnan, Rachita Taneja, Raman Chima, Rohin Dharmakumar, Kiran Jonnalagadda, and Nikhil Pahwa — who had previously coordinated the SaveTheInternet.in net-neutrality campaign, which between 2014 and 2016 gathered more than 1.2 million signatures opposing telecom-operator zero-rating and prompted the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India to issue regulations prohibiting discriminatory pricing. The organisation became a staffed body in April 2018, at which point Apar Gupta — an Indian lawyer, Ashoka Fellow, and former practitioner in technology and privacy law — took over as Executive Director. Gupta served as Executive Director from April 2018 to July 2023 and returned to lead the organisation as Founder Director in November 2024.

IFF is registered as an Indian non-profit trust under Sections 80G and 12A of the Income Tax Act 1961, with by-laws adopted on 17 August 2022 and a Board of Trustees comprising Rachita Taneja, Aravind Ravi-Sulekha, Karthik Balakrishnan, and Apar Gupta. The organisation publishes monthly transparency reports and is rated by Guidestar India and the Credibility Alliance, and has stated an intention to add two further trustees with full voting and agenda-setting powers to broaden public participation in its governance.

Programme areas

IFF's public programme structure runs across roughly five interlocking lines of work. The first is privacy and data protection: the SaveOurPrivacy campaign, launched in 2018, produced an Indian Privacy Code drafted with thirty-five partner organisations that was introduced twice in Parliament as a Private Member's Bill, and IFF has filed interventions in the WhatsApp–Facebook data-sharing constitution-bench proceedings before the Supreme Court and run a continuous critique of India's data-protection legislation. The second is surveillance and biometric rights, anchored by Project Panoptic (below) and by IFF's own surveillance-reform petition in the Supreme Court (Internet Freedom Foundation v. Union of India, 2019), challenging the Telegraph Act and IT Act electronic-surveillance frameworks and seeking judicial oversight over blanket interception orders. The third is internet shutdowns and connectivity, anchored by the KeepUsOnline campaign, IFF's legal support to petitioners in the Anuradha Bhasin v. Union of India Jammu and Kashmir shutdown case, and a quarterly Connectivity Tracker mapping the rural digital divide. The fourth is free speech and content regulation, including the Zombie Tracker database of cases prosecuted under the struck-down Section 66A of the IT Act, legal representation in challenges to the IT Rules 2021, and the Digital Patrakar Defence Clinic offering pro-bono legal assistance to journalists, cartoonists, and bloggers. The fifth is AI and algorithmic accountability, covering both the facial-recognition work and a broader stream of policy interventions on India's national AI strategy, the IndiaAI Mission, and the algorithmic decision-making layers of Aadhaar, UPI, AgriStack, DigiLocker, and the wider Digital Public Infrastructure stack.

Project Panoptic and facial-recognition campaigning

IFF's signature contribution to the corpus's facial-recognition and biometric-surveillance shape is Project Panoptic, a public tracker of facial-recognition technology procurement and deployment by central, state, and municipal authorities across India. The tracker was launched on 27 November 2020 and built jointly with volunteers from DataKind Bangalore and the Indian open-source software company Frappe; it is the most comprehensive public database of Indian government FRT procurement in existence. As of November 2021 Panoptic documented seventy-eight FRT projects across India with a combined budgeted spend of approximately 9.6 billion Indian rupees, and the tracker has since expanded past 120 government FRT tenders, with state-by-state breakdowns, a crowdsourced "Report an FRT System" feature, and a public petition demanding a government moratorium on facial-recognition development and use. The tracker's data has been cited in independent reporting by Wired, Al Jazeera, and The Times of India and has fed directly into legal action: IFF helped draft and provided legal expertise to the 2021–22 public-interest litigation brought by the Hyderabad-based activist S.Q. Masood at the Telangana High Court challenging the Hyderabad police force's expansive deployment of live facial recognition as lacking statutory basis and proportionality, the first significant judicial challenge to police FRT in India. Project Panoptic's Hyderabad-leg #BanTheScan campaign was conducted in partnership with Amnesty International and Article 19.

Internet shutdowns: Anuradha Bhasin and after

IFF's most consequential case to date has been its support to the petitioners in Anuradha Bhasin v. Union of India, brought in the Supreme Court after the 5 August 2019 communications blackout imposed across Jammu and Kashmir alongside the abrogation of Article 370. The Supreme Court's judgment of 10 January 2020 held that an indefinite suspension of internet services would be illegal under Indian law, that any shutdown order must satisfy the tests of necessity and proportionality, and — most importantly for the wider digital-rights field — that access to the internet is integral to the freedom of speech and expression protected by Article 19(1)(a) of the Indian Constitution. The case is the first major decision in any constitutional democracy to recognise internet access as load-bearing on a fundamental free-speech right, and is now the routine reference point in Indian internet-shutdown litigation and policy debate.

The organisation has continued to litigate and document the rolling pattern of Indian shutdowns since. In May 2020, IFF supported the Foundation for Media Professionals' Supreme Court petition that led to the partial restoration of 4G mobile data in Jammu and Kashmir after a 550-day mobile-broadband blackout. In June 2023, IFF and Human Rights Watch jointly published No Internet Means No Work, No Pay, No Food, the first systematic documentation of how India's then-record 84 internet shutdowns in 2022 (out of 187 globally) compounded the harms of biometric-authenticated welfare delivery — denying subsidised food rations under the Public Distribution System, NREGA rural-employment wages, and online medical and banking services to the marginalised communities most dependent on those systems. The report's framing — that algorithmic and biometric public-service delivery converts an internet shutdown into a denial of basic constitutional and socio-economic rights — is the corpus's clearest articulation of how digital-public-infrastructure failure modes engage the make-AI-good agenda.

AI and algorithmic-accountability policy work

Beyond facial recognition, IFF has run a continuous stream of submissions and critiques on Indian AI policy. The organisation submitted comments on the Department of Telecommunications' draft "Indian AI Stack" framework in 2019, has produced an extended public critique of the NITI Aayog National Strategy for Artificial Intelligence ("#AIforAll") on accountability, fundamental-rights, and procurement grounds, and has filed submissions on the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology's 2025 AI Governance Guidelines under the IndiaAI Mission. A separate IFF blog series examined Airtel's machine-learning web-content filtering system, arguing that the unaudited deployment of an algorithmic filter at the carrier layer "could enable unchecked censorship" by a single private actor across a substantial share of India's mobile internet population. The organisation has also fed into the UNDP's "Universal DPI Safeguards" framework on the human-rights implications of digital-public-infrastructure stacks, and has run a sustained Aadhaar / UPI / AgriStack / ONDC / DigiLocker monitoring stream that connects automated-decision-making, identity, and welfare delivery into a single accountability frame. IFF received the Prix Ars Electronica 2022 Honorary Mention for its body of digital-rights work and the Global Privacy Assembly 2025 Privacy and Human Rights Award.

Funding and independence

IFF runs on a predominantly community-funded model, with the majority of income coming from small, repeat donations by Indian citizens through low-fee donation programmes and periodic crowdfunding pushes, supplemented by organisational donations and grants from philanthropic and corporate funders disclosed through its monthly transparency reports. The organisation publishes its rolling donor lists and the legal-team composition of its strategic litigation, and has structured itself as an Indian non-profit trust precisely to maintain capacity to litigate against the Indian Union and state governments without the regulatory and FCRA constraints that have complicated foreign-funded civil-society operation in India under the post-2020 amendments to the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act.

Posture in the movement

IFF's place in the make-AI-good corpus is as the principal South Asia organisation working on the privacy, surveillance, and algorithmic-accountability layers of Indian state and corporate AI — distinct from the corpus's existing UK, US, and continental-European strategic-litigation, civil-liberties, and digital-rights clusters because its operating environment combines the world's largest single biometric-identity stack (Aadhaar), a record-leading rate of internet shutdowns, a fast-growing state and commercial facial-recognition surveillance estate, and a body of Indian constitutional doctrine in which the right to access the internet has already been judicially recognised. The organisation's working theory of change — combining digital-first public campaigning, the higher-judiciary strategic-litigation tradition of the Indian public-interest-litigation system, parliamentary engagement on technology bills, and crowdsourced and partner-built investigative trackers — is the South Asian template for engaging non-specialist Indian publics in shaping how facial-recognition, biometric identity, automated welfare administration, and other AI systems are deployed by the Indian state. Project Panoptic is the single most-cited civil-society dataset on Indian FRT deployment in domestic and international reporting; Anuradha Bhasin v. Union of India is the global civil-society precedent on internet access as a constitutional right; and the 2023 joint report with Human Rights Watch on shutdowns and biometric welfare is the clearest corpus-side articulation of the algorithmic and infrastructural harms that connect Indian shutdown jurisprudence to the wider make-AI-good agenda.