Anirudh Harshavardhan

India, with its booming start-up ecosystem, is being ushered into a new age of digitalisation. The country also has the third-highest rate of cyber attacks, with only a fraction of it detected, and only a mere 20-30% of that being addressed through means of manual investigation. This means that cyber-security is imperative to businesses being conducted online. The pandemic has only catalysed this online-everything lifestyle; e-commerce and remote working has been more or less cemented into the social fabric.

With an ever-increasing number of individuals being equipped with a smartphone, Big Tech companies such as Meta (formerly Facebook), Google, Amazon and Microsoft, whose services take up the lion’s share of the digital market, hoard colossal amounts of data on its users, which acts as a kind of surveillance into people’s behaviours. This data comprises everything from phone calls, clicks, likes, comments and shares, to keyboard inputs, spending habits, and even relationships, sleep patterns and health information. Automated ‘smart home’ services means that Big Tech is inside your home, mapping users of a household, apart from having a foot – or tentacle – into all your devices and communications.

This kind of massive and privatised invasion into users’ lives steers populations towards a future where things are run at the behest of a handful of people, which is why there needs to be structured data protection laws in place wherever these companies operate their services. There is a ‘greater good’ argument employed by these companies to justify this level of ‘learning’, and those who point at the gaping holes are demonised and vilified against that argument. Refusal to participate only means a denial of these services which make our lives that much more convenient, along with labels of blanket terms like misanthrope, anarchist and Luddite.

Alongside several Indian technology companies, several international corporations have also  based part of their operations in India, but the absence of any sort of structured legislation regarding data protection in India means that companies here have to adhere to data privacy agreements with overseas clients, making this process lengthy and difficult. For example, the GDPR – General Data Protection Bill – is an EU-wide attempt at data regulation that is uniform across all member states of the European Union. The United States is also in the process of introducing a new data privacy bill which prohibits tech giants like Google and Facebook from offering targeted advertisements to its users based on their online behaviours. This practice may seem like a harmless nudge towards purchasing commodities, but for the fact that this also fuels rampant misinformation, disinformation, voter suppression, not to mention racist, casteist and religious divides.

So, until Big Tech opens its doors to external scrutiny, democracies everywhere will only continue to be at the mercy of the private companies and an obscenely wealthy minority of people.