Kartik Moudgil T.E IT
Digital privacy refers to the degree to which someone’s information residing on digital gadgets lies within their control. It is fraught with complexities; does the data gathered on a person’s actions on a particular website lie in the website’s dominion? Here, the answer lies in the disclaimer tucked away neatly in one obscure corner of the website, ‘yes’. Is it okay to predict the consumer’s past purchase history to predict future purchase suggestions? Probably yes. Is it okay to sell this information to advertising companies such as Google to generate relevant ads? Might be. Is it okay to use this data to apply discriminatory pricing to products? Definitely not. Sell it to telemarketers to get personalised spam calls and SMSs? Absolutely not.
There exists one extreme school of thought; there is no real privacy on the Internet. It can be conclusively proved thru researching the seedy darknet- the kind of information sold there is enough to confirm one’s worst fears. For the majority of us, however, there exist grey areas in digital privacy- there are usually many kinds of data mining services running within our daily usage, which is generally compliant with proper handling of consumer data. Geolocation mapping, app usage tracking, metadata collection, error logging, etc. are all sources of information gleaned specifically from smartphones. Concern over this may push one to extreme lengths to disrupt this information, by using various tactics. However, in the context of a million users, this class of users would hardly be a single digit percentage. All the major companies dealing with this data include (perhaps not very easily accessible) options to disable collection of this data, to remain within the legal framework required.
In the well-known bulk data collection & processing carried out by the NSA via the PRISM, MUSCULAR and INCENSE program, the reality of digital privacy was revealed. A collection of data from ISPs, telecom operators, between internet backlinks, and its storage in several organised databases. A low-level analyst could enter a person’s name to reveal their address, emails, VoIP calls and even whether they’d liked the NSA Facebook page. Obviously, digital privacy has been completely compromised in this case, at the highest governmental level.
DIGITAL PRIVACY