The Internet increasingly looks like a hamam, the public bath, where you cannot and do not hide anything. This version of Picasa runs in the background to organise all your photographs. It asks for your approval or a name and once you have added it, it is there forever. It scans your computer and discovers photographs in which you are there. You can even add names of people you have barely met. If you want, you can add the location where the photograph was shot. When all this is said and done you have a database that not only identifies you but also what you have done in the past. All this is voluntary.
Running on a different premise is Recognizr, an application that currently works with Android phones. Click a photograph of a passing stranger or the diner on the next table and the app fetches all the dope on the person from the name, identity to status updates from Twitter, Facebook and Linkdin wherever the photograph occurs. Without so much as by-your-leave. All this voluntary, or so they say.
Most netizens have written off Google Buzz. But there are people who have embraced it and believe they are having fun. While others such as this one says: “Thanks @twitter for ruining the privacy and telling the world where I am tweeting from. Turning it off. Last tweet.”
As Donald Rumsfeld would have said, all the dots are there now it requires someone to just link them together. How this voluntary, information in public domain changes into non-voluntary, coercive fact of life has to seen in action on the streets of Hyderabad.
At some of the important traffic junctions, there are CCTV cameras that record every movement on the road. Break a rule and you will get a challan at home with a photograph showing the time and moment of violation.
This is not all. From April 26 to June 10, the enumerators of National Population Register bundled with the Census will come calling.
Armed with an exhaustive 15-point questionnaire, you will have to give details like mother's name, marital status, educational qualification, date of birth and sex, occupation and stay at the current location and permanent address.
The census and NPR have statutory backing of legislations - the Census Act 1948 and The Citizenship (Registration of Citizens and Issue of National Identity Cards) Rules, 2003. Hence cooperating with census takers and sharing details with them is legally bound as the government promises full confidentiality of data.
This time the census will be two-round affair.
The first round for the information and the second round for the photograph and biometric information of everyone over the age of 15. All this information is confidential, or so they say.
Just as they promise confidentiality of voting. But remember that few days before voting day, we have party workers walking in with a bunch of chits in which our names, age, sex and address are printed?
“I find that the present generation have so embraced technology that there has been no scope in their lives for questioning what else it can do in the lives of people, beyond what is obvious to them,” says Usha Ramanathan, a law researcher and teacher.
“About privacy, we have given up a great deal without understanding what it means. Targeting, surveillance, access to all kinds of information about another – think about what this means.
I think part of the reason that so many in the younger set are not currently bothered by all this is because there is a depoliticising of their lives that has set in,” says Usha.
The information from the Census will be used for creation of a 16-digit Unique Identification Number and on the hazy horizon is NATGRID.
Between voluntarily losing privacy due to peer pressure and non-voluntarily losing for identity, the choice is not really ours to make.
