MobileActive.org

FrontlineSMS is a software platform that enables structured communication via text messaging, using only a computer and a mobile phone or GSM (Global System for Mobile) modem. The platform enables two-way messaging between users and groups of people via mobile networks without the need for an Internet connection.

The purpose of this guide is to provide FrontlineSMS users designing, implementing, and monitoring programs with data integrity concerns in mind with a data integrity framework. The guide is intended to help users to understand, analyze, and address the vulnerabilities, risks and threats that can affect the integrity of the information communicated through the FrontlineSMS platform.

 

As internet and mobile phone use increases, technology is transforming the field of transparency and accountability making it an increasingly dynamic space across the globe. Technology is helping to improve citizen participation in decision-making and producing new ways of identifying public service challenges through processes such as ‘data mashing’.

This paper documents current trends in the way technology is being used to promote transparency in different parts of the world. It reviews over 100 projects from across Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America, examining how new technologies are re-energising traditional methods. In particular, it focuses on how these new technologies are helping to engage different actors from citizens, media, authorities and the private sector.

Our research finds promising success stories alongside less accomplished examples. The authors argue that a key element of successful technology use in transparency and accountability efforts is their speed – both in execution and in stimulating change. Well-designed efforts produced relevant and usable information that can be used to demand accountability quickly. Technology for transparency and accountability tools need not be sophisticated, but it does need intelligent design that is relevant to the local context. Projects also have a better chance of effectively producing change when they take a collaborative approach, sometimes involving government.

Service providers periodically publish different tariff offers with the objective of both customer acquisition and customer retention. Transparency in the provision of telecommunication services and tariff offers has always been and continues to be of prime concern to the Authority. TRAI has in the past taken several steps to enhance transparency in tariff offers.

The Authority, however, is receiving several complaints and representations from consumers and their representatives seeking further effective transparency measures. In view of the increased competition as well as the spread of telecom activity to rural areas, the relevance of having a more transparent regime for tariff offerings cannot be overemphasised.  At the same time, service providers and their associations have also raised certain concerns. This consultation paper brings out various issues that have a bearing on telecom tariff offers.

Participatory sensing technologies could improve our lives and our communities, but at what cost to our privacy? They place calls, surf the Internet, and there are close to 4 billion of them in the world. Their built-in microphones, cameras, and location awareness can collect images, sound, and GPS data. Beyond chatting and texting, these features could make phones ubiquitous, familiar tools for quantifying personal patterns and habits. They could also be platforms for thousands to document a neighborhood, gather evidence to make a case, or study mobility and health. This data could help you understand your daily carbon footprint, exposure to air pollution, exercise habits, and frequency of interactions with family and friends.

 

 

In the mobile communication systems, security (encryption) offered by the network operator only applies on the wireless link. Data delivered through the mobile core network may not be protected. Existing end-to-end security mechanisms are provided at application level and typically based on public key cryptosystem.

The main concern in a public-key setting is the authenticity of the public key; this issue can be resolved by identity-based (IDbased) cryptography where the public key of a user can be derived from public information that uniquely identifies the user.

This paper presents an encryption mechanism based on the IDbased scheme using Elliptic curves to provide end-to-end security for SMS. This mechanism has been implemented over the standard SMS network architecture and the encryption overhead has been estimated and compared with RSA scheme. This study indicates that the ID-based mechanism has advantages over the RSA mechanism in key distribution and scalability of increasing security level for mobile service.

 

Mobile-based branchless banking has become one of the key mechanisms for extending financial services to disenfranchised populations in the world's developing regions. One shortcoming of today's branchless banking systems is that they rely largely on network-layer services for securing transactions and do not implement any application-layer security. Recent attacks on some of the most popular branchless banking systems show that these systems are not end-to-end secure.

In this paper, we make the case for designing mobile-based branchless banking systems which build security into the application layer of the protocol and guarantee end-to-end security to system users. Our main contribution is a threat model which effectively captures the goals of end-to-end authenticated transactions in branchless banking. This model, besides incorporating the obvious external threats to a protocol, also accounts for the possibility of insider attacks - those mountable by banking agents or other human intermediaries in the system. We then provide recommendations for solution design based on the security requirements of our model and the infrastructural constraints under which branchless banking systems operate.

This paper focuses on how this intermingling of lives and livelihoods, as mediated by the mobile phone, figures into the micro-processes of economic development. It neither broadly elaborates the core contributions of mobile phone use to economic development (synchronizing prices, expanding markets, reducing transport costs, etc.), nor suggests that one kind of mobile use is more important than another. Instead, it argues simply for a perspective on work and on livelihoods that is broad enough to account for (and perhaps even take advantage of) the social processes surrounding these activities. Analysts, policymakers, and technologists interested in the application of Mobiles for Development (M4D) should not ignore the way mobiles blur livelihoods and lives; the developmental and nondevelopmental uses of the mobile are not in competition, nor are they always distinguishable. Instead, the uses of mobiles for developmental and non-developmental purposes are often interrelated and sometimes mutually reinforcing. The social functions of the mobile (in matters of connection and self-expression) are helping drive its widespread adoption, and these same functions inform the very behaviors that make the mobile a tool for economic development.