Privacy rights and social media - what you need to know

Introduction:?

Social Media was playing a very vital role in our everyday life. Half a population of the world uses social media platforms for different means including business, education, marketing etc. The latest data from GSMA intelligence reveals that nearly 66% of the world's total population uses the internet, and around 62% of the world's population uses social media. At the start of 2024 nearly 5.04 billion of active social media users' identities were found. The world spends a huge amount of time using social media everyday and there were many studies which found that the social media users spend at least 2 hours in a day using social media.

Social media has created many positive impacts in an individual life and in a society. When we start to look into the advantages of social media, we can start from its greatest influence in marketing, building relationships through better communication, spreading news, creating awareness, showing empathy and helping others, building a business, finding opportunities, education and research, and the list goes on. All these advantages of social media can also lead to an increase in the number of potential users. Even though there are many merits in using social media it also contains a lot of negative impact.?

Most of the time positive impacts of social media? overlap and suppress the ill of social media. The increase in social media usage paves the way for many? crimes like cyber stalking, cyberbullying, identity theft, online threats, hacking, child exploitation etc. Apart from all these crimes, protecting our privacy on social media has turned into a great task nowadays. Violation of privacy is a major concern which was often faced by the users.?

Social media and privacy issues:

Social media has become a necessary daily activity. Every user of social media shares their personal information like their name, phone number, email id, address in that platform. All the information an individual shares on social media platforms can be mishandled and used for any unethical gain. Hence, privacy became a greatest concern for the users.?

When we talk about social media privacy, it includes all the private and sensitive information that can be discovered about the users from their accounts. For the criminal offenders, an email id or a phone number is enough to hack your account and collect information about the users. Through the phone number and emails they will send? you inappropriate messages and trick you into clicking harmful links.?

By watching your posts, the content you watch, the content you like they will identify your moods, choices and situation and there will be a high chance of threat to your security. Sometimes when you over share your situations and emotions on social media platforms, the offenders find it easy to threaten you based on that. For example, If you are a person who shares everything in your social media, they will watch your? activities and at the right time they will use it against you. There was one famous model who was robbed at gunpoint at a Parisian hotel and the robbers stole millions of worth jewelry from her. During the investigation it was found that the robbers had been following her on social media platforms quite long and they came to know she was staying in that particular hotel after the fashion week. So they used this opportunity for their gain. This incident creates a great question on the right to privacy. Not only celebrities, many individuals face this kind of situation but they were not brought into the limelight.?

In many cases, most of the social media platforms were in partnership with third-party services. During this collaboration the chances of sharing the information of the users to the third party services is high, which ultimately creates a significant risk in the privacy of the users. We have often noted the relevance between the advertisements which pop up on our social media pages and the things we actually searched on any other social websites. We mostly focused on those advertisements, although we don’t think about how these information are shared. All these third-party services make our jobs easy, but Don’t it affect your privacy by? sharing our? information without our knowledge?. These data sharing happens may be with or without our permission. Isn’t it a serious case of privacy violation?

We may think why privacy actually matters? And we don’t need to fear when we have nothing to hide. But think of a company knowing all your personal, every conversation? you have, your every move, even they know about your past, present and they can even predict your future. All this information and knowledge they have about you has the capacity to harm you and can create a great security threat.?

What does social media do with our personal data?

What exactly does it mean when we talk about personal data? Personal data includes every information related to the individual which starts from their name, age, sexual orientation , location, date of birth, religious beliefs, phone number, email address and all your likes and dislikes.?

Do you know how much data these social media platforms have about you?? the social media platform will start to collect information about you immediately after you enter into it. It collects all your personal information which includes your personal and lifestyle choices, your behavior,? communication, engagement which happens on that platform. Sometimes when you link your one social media platform like your Facebook, Instagram or what’s up with any other social media platform like a dating app, matrimony, or your food delivery app, gaming app etc., you are giving all these social media websites more knowledge about you. In 2017, a journalist requested her personal information from the famous dating app of that time called “Tinder”, under European data protection law and surprisingly she got 800 pages of data about her which covers the profiles she liked to her deepest and darkest secrets. This clearly shows that all these social media data are storing our information and these data will remain even if you delete the app.

The thing which is more concerning is, these platforms, websites and companies are using your data to know about you completely by knowing your preferences on things. And these are also shared with other parties or researchers in some cases. What if these data were breached or leaked? There were already a lot of cases that exist. For example, In AIR India, personal data of 4.5 million users was breached. In a big basket nearly 20 million customers' personal information were allegedly sold on the dark web. In 2020, the information about the users of Bharat matrimony were put up for sale on the dark web.

Rights to privacy in India:?

The Acts and guidelines which deals with right to privacy and data protection in India are listed below:

IT ACT 2000: Section 43A of the IT Act, stated that every company or body which possesses or handles any ‘sensitive personal data’ or information should provide reasonable security to such data. In case of negligence the company will be held liable to pay compensation to the affected person. Here the IT act defines ‘personal information’ to mean the information related to a natural person which can identify such a person. Furthermore, "sensitive personal data or information" is defined as a subset of this information that includes items such as the individual's username, passwords, financial information, health conditions/biometrics, sexual orientation, and so on.

IT RULES 2011: The IT rules, 2011 talks about withdrawal of consent from an individual for collecting personal data. Under this, the personal data only covers the sensitive personal data and this rule is silent about the aftermath of withdrawal of consent. This act also provides that any information that is collected can only be used for the purpose for which the data has been collected.

AADHAR ACT:? There has been a lot of controversies about the Aadhaar scheme and privacy related issues. The Aadhaar act, has provided provisions which allows storage of data of an individual for a period of five years. This Act also ensures protections of data of Aadhar holders from illegal disclosure. The information and other confidential data collected on UIDAI softwares are encrypted to prevent leak in transit. The system has also taken comprehensive security policies to ensure the safety of the data. The Aadhaar act also stated some civil and criminal penal consequences for unauthorized access like hacking , tampering of data.

RBI GUIDELINES: The RBI guidelines have insisted, before sharing personal information with any third party, the borrower’s explicit consent is required. RBI guidelines dealing with data privacy and security of customer information are the responsibility of the Regulated Entities, and they must ensure that the lending service providers and Digital Lending Applications as they work by the guidelines stated by RBI.

PUTTASWAMY CASE: In Justice K. S. Puttaswamy (Retd) Vs Union of India (2017), a nine-judge bench of the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that Indians have a constitutionally protected fundamental right to privacy that is an inherent aspect of life and liberty under Article 21. It found that privacy is a natural right that inheres in all natural persons, and that the right can only be limited by governmental action that passes each of the three tests : To justify state action, it must have a legal mandate, have a legitimate goal, and be commensurate to a democratic society's needs.

Digital personal data protection Act,2023: The first law in India which exclusively fills the crucial gap and ensures India aligns with global data protection standards. This law specifically entails individuals personal data and makes sure that the entities handling their data transparently and carefully. This Act also mentioned various principles on data minimization, storage limitations and accountability. Although this Act has been adopted only some provisions took immediate effect and others were allowed to be adopted by the businesses and entities gradually.?

Conclusion:?

Have we ever thought about what we are agreeing to by clicking that "I agree" button on social media websites? Social media has become an integral part of our daily lives, but it’s important to use these platforms responsibly and with caution. Before we agree to their terms and conditions, we should know what is actually mentioned in them. social media? platforms , websites will collect all your data and they process it into statistics that are ready to be sold. Once your information is in the network, it is unable to be erased, even if the companies are forced to erase your data. By applying the principle of data minimization, you can actually minimize the information that is being shared. For example, you can allow the navigating app to access your location only when you use it; there is no need for that app to know about your location always.?