How and Why PRIVACY matters!
An open letter to India’s External Affair’s Minister - Salman Khurshid
I woke up this morning to this tweet!
I realized how ignorant most people are about privacy and its implications. This post is to educate more people about privacy and how it affects each and everyone of us, even the people around us who have never and will never use the Internet.
My first real introduction with privacy was when I took my first major project at SlideShare, where I work. It was to polish some of the features for better user experience. Unfortunately, I have a process of how I work. I have to use the product and be in love with it to actually work on it. Passion is the key in whatever I do.
So, I started to understand what privacy is and how it matters. Growing up, like most Engineers, the first thing I tried to do with my new found powers in computing was to crack (popularly known as hack) passwords of friend’s email address. It was the 2000s and no one actually paid attention to security. Even Google’s homepage used to be prone to XSS attacks.
To understand privacy, I had to understand why reading someone’s email is evil. It seemed so harmless.
I started looking for users, who used privacy most actively.
Analytics are a great way to understand anything. They are the proof your thoughts are looking for to convert themselves into actions.
What I realised was quite a revelation. Governments and large corporation were the power users of privacy. All of them used to pay huge amounts every month to just have privacy.
This is was a shock, as I thought governments and large corporation are the institutions built on transparency. I started to think why they would what to do this and the conclusion changed my outlook on privacy.
Privacy is not important for individuals but it is very important for the society.
We elect people to run our country. We wilfully give them the powers to become kings. What if the king becomes a tyrant? What if the elected official wasn’t the person we thought he was. He would have access to all our private thoughts. He would have prior knowledge of every single attempt to dethrone him. He would become god!
Do we need gods in this day and age? I don’t think so!
Mr. Salman Khurshid, we know you have a smart diplomat but you don’t seem to understand the gravity of why privacy matters, just like me two years back.
Think of your statement from this morning, even before you gave the statement to media, you must have discussed it with your team, over phone or email. What if (and I am pretty sure they are) all your conversations were snooped upon, are you comfortable with that?
Today, USA is a friend of ours, do you think the situation will remain the same forever? Are you comfortable letting the Big Brother know all our internal plans about India’s External affairs? Is your opponent in the next election comfortable knowing that you have access to all their game plans? Is that fair in a democracy?
India is a great country, we have the most talented and most hardworking people in the world. But unfortunately, everything sells in India, whether you like it or not. Companies can bribe and get information on what their competitors are doing. Political parties in power can misuse the information to crush their opponents.
The bottomline is I am really not that concerned about my privacy. I am an ordinary citizen, I have nothing much to hide. This goes for most citizens.
But I am concerned about your privacy and the privacy of all our elected representatives because what you discuss, what you write, what you plan behind closed doors concerns the lives of 1 billion+ Indians.
Privacy is to democracy what oxygen is to humans - Indispensable!
If you are concerned about privacy like me, give me a shout out on twitter. I am @troysk704 and I #FightForFuture!
This is a crosspost of my blogpost @ http://troysk.com/post/54413482104/how-and-why-privacy-matters
