Government must urgently bring a law to enshrine citizens’ right to privacy
Without a law on privacy, the government cannot demand that technology companies hardcode certain protocols into their products.
Is the right to privacy a fundamental right?
The Supreme Court on Tuesday deferred providing a definitive answer to this crucial question by referring a clutch of petitions that challenge the validity of Aadhaar, which is predicated on collecting biometric data, to a larger Constitution bench. During arguments, the court indicated it was persuaded that Article 21 — the right to life and liberty — would be rendered meaningless without reading into it a corresponding right to privacy. Though a final pronouncement on the subject has been postponed, the government’s apparent and overbearing attempts to intrude into the private lives of its citizens over the past few weeks should underscore the urgency of the matter.
This isn’t just because new technology has obliterated past levels of control over private information and, as Edward Snowden’s revelations showed, enabled state surveillance at unprecedented scale and scope. In the absence of a legislative framework to curb government overreach and abuse, initiatives such as the Orwellian-sounding Central Monitoring System — which aims to give the state the ability to listen in on and record phone calls and read private emails, as well as text and multimedia messages — and Aadhaar — which could be used to profile people and groups, if data is multiplexed — acquire sinister overtones. And without a law on privacy, the government cannot demand that technology companies hardcode certain protocols into their products.
But while India grapples with the shared difficulty of guaranteeing privacy in a global digital context, it is also still trying to draw lines between the public and private; what is the business of government and what emphatically is not. It is ironic that a state that believes, per Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi, that it is not the “moral police” should also ban 800-odd websites that host pornographic content, ostensibly to fight child pornography, and dictate what kind of food people are allowed to eat. Then there was Rohatgi’s query to the court in the PIL filed seeking to criminalise the viewership of porn: “Can we be present in someone’s bedroom?” Clearly the BJP-run state of Maharashtra didn’t get the memo, because last week, Mumbai Police conducted an outrageous operation to shame and harass unmarried couples in search of, yes, privacy in hotel rooms. This raid, allegedly carried out on the basis of an “unverified”, anonymous tip-off about “prostitution-like activities” in the area, is another instance of a conservative, archaic code of morality being forcefully imposed on people. The government is displaying a troubling willingness to meddle in decisions that adult individuals are entirely capable of taking on their own — and to crudely invade intimate spaces even as it continues to shrink the safe zone of what constitutes permissible behaviour. This conflict between outdated social norms and individual licence makes a right to privacy that is explicitly enshrined in law an imperative.
- See more at: http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/editorials/public-private-2/#sthash.WWtjfDJ1.dpuf
