Is banning facial recognition the right option for India too?
The good, the bad, and the nuances in between of regulating technology
N S Ramnath
Senior Editor
Founding Fuel
NS Ramnath is a member of the founding team & Lead - Newsroom Innovation at Founding Fuel, and co-author of the book, The Aadhaar Effect. His main interests lie in technology, business, society, and how they interact and influence each other. He writes a regular column on disruptive technologies, and takes regular stock of key news and perspectives from across the world.
Ram, as everybody calls him, experiments with newer story-telling formats, tailored for the smartphone and social media as well, the outcomes of which he shares with everybody on the team. It then becomes part of a knowledge repository at Founding Fuel and is continuously used to implement and experiment with content formats across all platforms.
He is also involved with data analysis and visualisation at a startup, How India Lives.
Prior to Founding Fuel, Ramnath was with Forbes India and Economic Times as a business journalist. He has also written for The Hindu, Quartz and Scroll. He has degrees in economics and financial management from Sri Sathya Sai Institute of Higher Learning.
He tweets at @rmnth and spends his spare time reading on philosophy.
My contributions
160 articles written
The hyperlocal WhatsApp strategy, policy windows and AI food tasters
May 10, 2019: A roundup of news and perspective on disruptive technology from around the world. Also in this issue: gene editing to prevent heart attack, and what North Korea's radio-tochkas show us about Big Tech's privacy violations
Robo-taxis, privacy committees and wearables to augment intelligence
May 04, 2019: A roundup of news and perspectives on disruptive technology from around the world. In this issue: Tesla’s robo-taxi networks, Facebook’s privacy positions, Microsoft’s Blockchain partnership, wearables, carbon sucking plants and more
The future of food, social media platforms and facial recognition
April 27, 2019: A roundup of news and perspectives on disruptive technology from around the world. In this issue: Sri Lanka’s social media ban, Beyond Meat IPO, facial recognition, employee activism, robot rights and more
Bias, fixing brains, and the difficulty of regulating tech
April 20, 2019: A roundup of news and perspective on disruptive technology from around the world. In this issue: Regulatory sandboxes; brain implants and genetic engineering; and AI bias
India doesn't have a jobs crisis, it has a wages crisis
Is technology killing jobs? And can India use technology to create jobs? Teamlease’s Manish Sabharwal says, our problem is providing a living wage, not jobs. We need to worry about improving productivity through the application of land, labour, and capital—and not so much the impact of automation
Exploring black holes, space, and mapping Earth
April 14, 2019: A roundup of news and perspective on disruptive technology. In this issue: the science behind the black hole photo; how Facebook is mapping Earth; private rocket science; data and privacy; the future of jobs; and EVs path to profitability
The bias in technology
April 06, 2019: A roundup of news and perspective on disruptive technology. In this issue: Tech’s complicated relationship with government; robots, drones and anti-drones; and environmentally cool food
Managing yourself, and the world
March 26, 2019: A roundup of news and perspective on disruptive technology. In this issue: Enhancing human performance, designing for the future, consent brokers
When we ask machines to do our work
March 19, 2019: A roundup of news and perspective on disruptive technology. In this issue: AI’s impact on surgical skills, air crashes, electric vehicles and data for public good