Your Privacy Is Dead!

Allegations of social media sites and analytics firms harvesting user data to help political parties craft election strategies raise serious questions about the safety of your personal information. Is it time to reassess your digital footprint?

- Kaushik Deka

“Both the public and the private sector are collecting and using personal data at an unprecedented scale and for multifarious purposes. While data can be put to beneficial use, the unregulated and arbitrary use of data, especially personal data, has raised concerns regarding the privacy and autonomy of an individual. Some of the concerns relate to centralisation of databases, profiling of individuals, increased surveillance and a consequent erosion of individual autonomy.”

This is what a nine-member committee of experts formed by the Union government to study various issues related to data protection had said in a white paper four months before two national parties of the country—the BJP and the Congress—got embroiled in a nasty slugfest over data theft. On March 27, Christopher Wylie, a former employee of British data analytics and political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica (CA), which had allegedly stolen the data of 50 million Facebook users in 2014, claimed that the Congress party was the firm’s client in India. Two days earlier, the Congress had alleged that the Narendra Modi mobile application (NaMo app), launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2015, had been stealing data of those who downloaded the app and sharing it with a third party based in the US. The app, according to media reports, seeks 22 permissions, including access to contacts, camera and location. The BJP not only rejected these allegations but also hit back at its rival, saying that the Congress mobile application shared users’ data with the party’s “friends in Singapore”.