Anika Desai

Digital Privacy Researcher & Tech Journalist

M.Sc. Cybersecurity, Georgia Tech

"Privacy isn't about having something to hide. It's about having the freedom to be fully yourself without being surveilled."

About Anika

Anika Desai is a digital privacy researcher and tech journalist. She spent 4 years at the Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF) in Delhi researching data protection laws before transitioning to writing.

Anika's work has been published in The Hindu, Scroll, MediaNama, and Rest of World. She specializes in breaking down complex privacy research — Mozilla Privacy Not Included audits, DPDPA analysis, encryption protocols — into writing real users can actually use.

Her reporting on the 2023 Tinder data leak and the Matrimony.com breach was cited by CERT-In. She advises Hidnn on privacy architecture and writes regularly about dating app data practices.

Areas of Expertise

Dating app privacy architectureIndian data protection law (DPDPA 2023)Data breach analysisEnd-to-end encryptionPrivacy by design principlesGDPR and global privacy frameworks

Education

●M.Sc. Cybersecurity, Georgia Institute of Technology
●B.Tech Computer Science, BITS Pilani
●CIPP/E (Certified Information Privacy Professional — Europe)

Experience

●Privacy Lead, Hidnn (2024–Present)
●Independent Tech Journalist (2022–Present)
●Policy Researcher, Internet Freedom Foundation (2018–2022)
●Security Analyst, Wipro (2015–2018)

Languages

English · Hindi · Gujarati

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