ET CONTRIBUTORS|
Updated: Sep 20, 2017, 12.08 AM IST
By Mrutyunjay Mahapatra
Civilisation is the process of setting man free from men.
Famous author Edward Snowden told, “Arguing that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say.” His words were prophetic.
Privacy as a concept is in a perpetual evolutionary phase. When men were hunter gatherers, there was no privacy. As rightly stated, “Civilisation is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage’s whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilisation is the process of setting man free from men.” Nation states, with collective will and persona, defined and shaped privacy in human life through instrumentalities like polity, judiciary, media and debates on gender equality.
With time, the demand for space of one’s own got accentuated. We never thought of privacy when governments collected massive data in census, in IT returns or employers in job applications, but we are worried about it now when Aadhaar is linked to benefit transfer or calls are made for offers. Every millisecond, huge amount of data is recorded and generated at multiple points. From monitoring traffic to tracking epidemic spread to trading stocks, time is of the essence. A few seconds’ delay in understanding information could cost money and life. Big data needs to be fast and smart. This speed and efficiency have become a double-edged sword for privacy. Smart data vision, IOT and data-led world are ringing alarm bells for privacy.
Should we prevent data collection, aggregation and analytics, touted as highly beneficial to the customers in deference to privacy?
Data Privacy and security because of interconnectedness are taken synonymously. Security is focused on ‘Blocking the Bad’ and ‘Allowing the Good’. For privacy in this digital world, this doesn’t work when everything could be compromised with camouflaged consent and we can’t keep pace with data to identify good from bad.
Data impacting individuals could be one or more of the three ownership characters,
i) What you know & what you have,
ii) What you don’t know & what you have
and iii) What you don’t know & what you don’t have.
Data privacy has three degrees— intensely private, semi-private and public. Where you live and where you work could be public data. What is your friends’ circle? The shopping trips you made and the jobs you applied for could be the semi-private data. relationships, criminal records, medico-legal history, etc., are examples of intensely private data.
Data protection is about securing data against unauthorised access, while data privacy defines boundaries of access. Security protects the information’s confidentiality, integrity and availability; privacy assures quality control of usage defined by owner or the law with the touchstone of fairness.
Data Privacy is a term hyped, misunderstood and philosophised because lack of distinction between raw data, analytical insights and results. It is interchangeably used for data compromise, data protection and data surveillance. ‘Interest and benefit’ of the data owner is the third dimension adding to the confusion. Some key questions are there — how to retrieve data if its privacy was compromised? In a connected environment, where boundaries of data are porous and fungible, how does data privacy play out? How to be data smart and put origin point preventions? The recent Supreme Court judgement holding privacy as a fundamental right equivalent to right to live, practice religion, freedom of speech, etc., has come at a time when all the countries around the world are engaged in understanding and stabilising the power, potential and disruption unleashed by information technology and digital world.
A near-term strategy for privacy is self-protection as well as basic ecosystem regulations. Origin point prevention is a necessity. This requires customer awareness as well as enforcement of disclosures. For example, privacy compromise mostly happens through ‘lazy’ consents at the time of download of free apps, inability of general public to read fine prints in websites and utilities like Google and Whatsapp, overwhelming short-term benefits of exchange of privacy, etc.
Privacy enforcement will require some reduction in user experience and benefits. We have to bear the downside of it, if privacy is our concern as new colonizers of data will continue to gather data walking around the regulations. Ecosystem of privacy enforcers include collection and storage disciplines. Today, people are increasingly making their personal information available publically, thanks to e-commerce, platforms like Ola, Uber and Amazon and initiatives like Digital India, Aadhaar and Demonetisation. Storage leads to privacy compromise. Time limits should be established for erasure. An authority and audit process must be prescribed to enforce this.
Technologies like smoke screens, data encryption and masking of personal identifiers are first steps to privacy. Thus for data privacy, the first call must be taken by the data owner, the individual, firm or the corporate. Short-term benefits like user experience, offers in e-commerce, socialisation, etc., are all compromisers of privacy, temporarily or permanently. We must decide with full knowledge. As Benjamin Franklin said: “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
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