I really don’t want to wade into this brouhaha over data leaks, privacy, and how Facebook, Cambridge Analytica (CA), the NaMo app and UIDAI are allegedly running away with our hard-earned data. I’ve had enough of these well fed activisty types. They roam around in air-conditioned Ola cabs claiming to defend the privacy of the silent Indian masses when the whole world knows that the silent Indian masses will gladly exchange their privacy for a few kilos of rice.
When will these social media wranglers wake up and smell the cow dung? If they did, they would not only see the writing on the wall but also notice that the wall is 13 ft high, five ft wide, and built of reinforced thick skin.
Believe the good people
There are two entities in the world that never lie: the government and the corporates. The government, in this instance embodied in the UIDAI (hereafter just ‘Dai’), has told us a hundred times that Aadhaar data are secure. That means they are secure — end of discussion.
Just because some jobless, attention-seeking Frenchman is doing Moulin Rouge on Twitter doesn’t mean we start doubting our own government. And what’s a Frenchman doing on Twitter anyway? If he was really French, he would be busy drinking wine, cooking soufflé, and having an extramarital affair in the Latin Quarter instead of bullying a poor country that can’t fight back.
Similarly, Mark Zuckerberg has told us a thousand times that he is a good guy. He was even hugged by Modiji. I refuse to believe that someone hugged by Modiji can do something evil. Simply put, the Aadhaar leaks and the Facebook-CA leaks are both complete non-issues.
Having said that, I must add that I am beginning to lose patience with these data-type fellows whose private lives are so impoverished that they spend all their time thinking up new ways to spy on people. Whether you are Dai, Zuckerberg, or just another influence-peddling stock market billionaire who’s befriended India’s politicians, bureaucrats, columnists, and think tanks, I have only one thing to say to you: if you want my data, just take it!
Take all of it, starting with my biometrics. Take my 10 fingerprints, all my toe prints, and my 32 dental imprints. Take my iris scans. Take samples of my hair, if you can find any, and harvest it for my DNA.
Once you’re done mopping up my biometrics, take all my demographic data, everything from my residence address, height, weight, BMI, date of birth, date of marriage, educational qualifications, employment history, credit history, location history, browsing history, shopping history, app history, medical history, and my lifetime’s history of the exact time I go for Swachh Bharat every morning.
In return, I ask for just one thing: stop being a pain you know where. I shall erase my humanity, crumple my personhood, and reduce myself to bits and bytes so you can hoard me in your omnivorous database. I shall link everything, including my own mother, to Aadhaar, if that’s what it takes to make India the greatest data farm in the history of the universe. But please stop giving me new tasks to do.
Don’t tell me, after six months, that I have to link my thermometer to Aadhaar in order to buy Crocin for my fever. You want to keep doing new and exciting things with my data, do it at your expense, in your own time, without forcing people to stand in multiple queues multiple times every other month.
Obsession of a privileged elite
On the question of privacy, I’ve already said I am in complete agreement with the Government of India. Privacy is not a part of Indian culture. If Indians truly believed in privacy, would we need a Swachh Bharat Abhiyan? Privacy is the obsession of a privileged elite seduced by western decadence. As one of our esteemed ministers put it, “We have absolutely no problem getting body naked before the white man for U.S. visa. When your own government asks for your name and address there is a massive revolution saying it’s intrusion in privacy.”
Personally speaking, I will never get “body naked” before a white man, or any man, for that matter, just for a visa. But I do buy the larger point that when your government asks you for something, you shouldn’t, in principle, refuse. If it’s a matter of selling your baby or giving up your parking spot, I would understand someone making a fuss. But only an utterly selfish individual would refuse to surrender his privacy — which he got for free, by the way — when the government asks him to.
Anyway, let’s not forget that Dai and Zuckerberg are not asking for your money — just your data, which, if you think about it calmly, is nothing but the digital equivalent of faeces. It’s what you excrete every second you spend online.
