Privacy: Does India really care?

While meetings between Elon Musk and PM Modi make the news on "obeying the local government laws or risk getting shut down", there is a bigger tech dialogue than censorship and hateful content that is not making enough news.

It's about the ownership, handling and usage of digital data. You might have heard about the Personal Data Protection Bill. But first things first, do Indians really care about privacy and personal data?

Privacy - A first world problem?

It is easy to find a boomer who goes "Privacy is a first world problem. These are all the learned getting paranoid looking at GDPR and CCPA."

Most of us won't agree with him. But it is important to underline that an Indian's inherent culture of community living and sharing with everyone might significantly change what their perception of the idea of privacy is, when compared to more individualistic nations.

That said, given the digital footprint India's 800M connected citizens are leaving behind, it is definitely not a matter to be taken lightly.

What do we have to gain?

A quick exercise is to go to App store/ Play store, find your favourite installed app, navigate to App privacy/ Data Safety and read about what data does the app have access to and what they use it for. Notice any patterns? "App functionality" and "Personalisation" seem to be a common theme. Same goes for the 100 page long privacy policies. Do they really need your exact location, sexual orientation and web browsing history for the app to function?

Not to say we don't benefit from sharing data. Oftentimes, we find the exact restaurant we needed for a date reservation, the most hilarious meme that we immediately forward to all groups, the special offer for our late night snacks, thanks to the same data we are crying about.

We do benefit. Its a trade-off we opt for. The questions we should be asking:

1. Are we getting the best deal?
2. If deals are not good, can we choose not to share?
3. Do we know what data about us is changing hands where? And so on..

Can the world be better?

It will take everyone's efforts to make it happen. Including:

1. The Government: Strong policymaking to drive more accountability of data. Make it too stringent, it could affect the tech growth and investments into the nation. Make it too lenient, end consumers might get exploited. The Personal Data Protection Bill is proposed to be a balancing act. Still not a law yet.
2. The Corporations: Shift to privacy safe solutions for data collaboration in line with global standards, non-sneaky compliance to laws defined by local regulators and investments into giving more control to the users
3. The Owner: With some data privacy awareness estimates being as low as 38% in India, literacy about the data rights is the first step. Consumers in the know play a major role in shifting control towards the individual.

The Hope

We always have the chance to surprise the world with the implementation of Consent Layer of the India Stack. Who knows we might revolution data ownership just like UPI did payments. Check out this talk on DEPA from iSpirt.

A version of this for financial data is already live in the form of Account Aggregators (AAs) with major banks onboard. It enables user-consented sharing of granular data between financial institutions with an objective of inclusivity of the un-banked.

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Liked what you read? Have opinions about the topic?

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On a lighter note, checkout the Black Mirror S06 E01 for fun

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