A case for Right To Privacy in India

Jatin Leuva
Aug 24, 2017 · 2 min read

The Internet is NOT a ‘global public good’ as many would like to put. And “Right to Internet” is a delusive term. The Internet is the extension of physical human environment. In fact, a global human environment. Its power and scale is so enormous that it has removed the physical boundaries of accessing the human lives.

Politicians and traders have ruled the humanity from the beginning of civilisation. As was the case in non-Internet era, here too, politicians and traders are in constant endeavour to control the Internet — a human environment that provides unlimited access to people’s behaviour and attention at the same time.

Technologically-challenged governments are framing laws and regulations to control the Internet with their limited non-Internet world view. That’s mostly because public uses the term “real world” and “virtual world” to display the understanding about the Internet. As if what they did on the Internet had no implication in the so called “real world”. Thus, we do not realise that human rights are so critical to the life we spend on the Internet.

Free and open human environment was and will never be the reality. Internet is no different. Every click, every scroll, every action we perform on the Internet can be and are probably being tracked and interpreted by the human-trained machines employed by Internet companies funded by all kinds of governments, corporates and individuals.

More and more elections are being fought based on our online behaviour. Governments, with existing set of laws, can easily frame most Internet user in criminal case. Likewise, most of the Internet companies can sue us for some or the violation. Of course they won’t do it until we challenge their authority, but that’s the whole point.

As the futurists unanimously put it, we are at the beginning point of the intelligent machine era. We do not know how exactly the story of human evolution from this point onwards will unfold, but they predict that AI enabled machines will replace most of the human jobs. The debate on Universal Basic Income has gained some support owing to these predictions. But these are the talks of the privileged ones; those who directly or indirectly control these technologies.

Going beyond the acknowledgement, I think it’s time we upgraded the current definitions of human rights with the fresh perspective wherein we take in to account the present and future technological advancements and its foreseeable impact on human lives. And Right to Privacy is and will remain the most important human right of the Internet citizen.

“Data is the new oil” said Clive Humby in 2006. And If I may add to it, we are the creator of this data, but with no control on its ownership.

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