“ Big Brother is watching you.”
― George Orwell, 1984
Data, the centre point of the digital revolution, has become a commodity. But are we really equipped to handle the new data-bloom in the digital space? With the Facebook data leak debate still raging, it is time we paid attention to the numerous social media platforms and apps in our digital devices that leach data without our even realising it. It is crucial that we become aware of what happens to our personal information and other details stored on the web by multiple players. Personal data, starting from the crucial biometric to the seemingly innocuous Internet-browsing data, need to come under scrutiny when privacy is concerned.
While privacy is a constitutionally protected individual right, there are many places where we give or are required to give our personal data consensually. The government and state bodies, hospitals, financial institutions, all collect and store our personal information in some form, mostly in digital format.
Owing to the structure of society, they do have some accountability to protect the data. But what about the ones that are outside the realm of accountability? How do we ensure the security of the data we share with private players, or rather, how do we ensure the security of data that private players collect through the apps and social media? Though we give ‘consent’ to many of the data-siphoning apps by clicking ‘Agreed’ to legally binding policies, who actually reads the wrapped text policies before clicking agreement? The recent data leak from Facebook reminds us once again that data are never going to be safe with private players who resort to data monetisation in order to enrich themselves.
What do small and big corporates do with data harvested by the social media and apps? ‘Targeted advertisement’ would be the simple answer. While the small corporates may use data as a commodity to be traded and transacted, big conglomerates seemingly use the large pool of data to feed their self-evolving Artificial Intelligence programs. And data mining, which eventually helps them identify patterns and user behaviour, in turn help in better marketing. The market of data is vast and reminds you of the storyline of the movie The Matrix, where bioelectricity is harvested from ‘enslaved’ human beings. As we unearth more and more dubious facts about Facebook and its dalliances with user data, we see how deep the surveillance web of the private players is.
What if Facebook uses its tools to scan through your messages and photos for flagged contents? How does it affect a law-abiding individual, who has nothing to hide? Facebook had a notorious mood-influencing project, which was apparently shelved following protests. There is no telling how dangerous this emotional contagion can be, considering how Facebook has spread across a range of demographics. The ability to create such illusory ideas in a user’s mind makes the big conglomerates a potential threat to society as a whole. This thus calls for a high degree of regularisation of such illusionists.
We already know how intricate algorithms can mine data to find our likes, dislikes, routines, preferences, favourite actors, the people we follow and so on. Maybe they can even figure out our political, religious affiliations as well. But as long as it involves only benign targeted advertisement of products, we may even be good.
Deception of data
But as we see, it does not end there. Each day, reports come out of how major elections across the globe, major decisions with economic impact such as Brexit, might have been influenced by deception of data in social media. If an organisation is powerful enough to influence emotions and opinions, resourceful enough to create illusions of truth as needed, it is only a matter of time before they monetise the power.
Data-sharing across platforms, camouflaged as time-saving methods, is prevalent in the digital world and it is not limited to Facebook. The mysterious bag you added to the Amazon cart, which keeps following you wherever you go in the web, the targeted ads appearing on every website you visit based on your Google search history… We do not even pay heed to these slight invasions of privacy or bother to change the settings. When Google search prompts you with tailored text based on previous searches, when Google assistant politely reminds you of your doctor’s appointment based on a mail you had received, rather than taking it as a convenience feature you should be wondering whether you want billion-dollar foreign conglomerates to know all your secrets. The way things evolve, the point is not far when insurance companies combine data from your fitness tracker apps and your grocery list to create a profile of your health, and determine your premium accordingly.
Stephen Hawking wrote, ominously: “AI could be the worst event in the history of our civilisation. It brings dangers, like powerful autonomous weapons, or new ways for the few to oppress the many. It could bring great disruption to our economy.”
Where is it all saved?
Coming down to granular-level data, where are all the digits of the data that are collected from us saved? Most of the social media we use in India belong to foreign corporates who have cloud servers on foreign lands and they come under the law of the land . Authorised government authorities of that country, unauthorised snipping off by hackers, we never know who has access to data. It is integral to have legal security for data handled by the private players in India. There is a recent directive from the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, to store government data on cloud servers located in India. While it is true that giving a legal boundary to data reduces the chance of data abuse and gives some accountability to the private players about the data they harvest, it beats the idea of the borderless web. Maybe that’s why we need technologies such as Blockchain with distributed storage of information. But till those technologies come in for good, we need to have some regulations in place.
Your digital footprint reveals a lot about you. Your personal information, financial information, political and religious affiliations, many things which you may or may not want to share, can be derived from your digital footprint. Shutting off social media and other digital platforms from our daily lives is not an option, but it is imperative for a user to know the details of what he or she has consented to share and the details of the data the user has shared so far. Above all, it is high time that India, with its thriving pool of engineers, has its own worldly recognisable social media platform.
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