Welcome pushback against invasion of online privacy
It was refreshing to see the Supreme Court batting on the front foot for the privacy of the individual. Pulling up WhatsApp, the court told the company it would examine and review its new policy to share user data with other sister platforms like Facebook and Instagram.
The apex court also said it would not be overawed by the ‘two or three trillion dollar’ social media giant when it came to defending peoples’ privacy rights. In recent days, there is a growing fear of personal details of social media users being harvested for targeted advertising and more sinister ends. The Cambridge Analytica scam, where an operative gleaned the profiles of 87 million Facebook users and used it to target potential voters in Donald Trump’s and others’ campaigns, is still fresh in people’s minds.
The fear is genuine as can be seen by the number of people who fled WhatsApp for relatively safer social media platforms like Telegram and Signal. In just three days after WhatsApp announced its new privacy policy on January 8, Signal and Telegram saw a 40-fold growth compared to the previous week.
The social media storm pushed WhatsApp to delay implementing its policy till May, but no amount of clarification—that only metadata would be shared, no chats and contact list of individual users would be harvested—worked. People are just not comfortable with Big Brother watching!
The petitioners against WhatsApp have pointed out to the court that the company had a different policy for Europe when compared to India; to which the company’s defense is: Europe has a data protection law while India doesn’t. As the dark end of the cyber world becomes more dangerous to individual rights, India should take this as a warning and legislate a privacy protection law at the earliest.
It must also be noted that individual privacy is under threat not only from private players like WhatsApp, but from a snooping government too. It’s not so long ago that we heard of the Aadhaar details of crores of Indians being compromised and even leaked to those who were willing to pay a price.