We live in a digital age. There was a time when if you didn’t know a word you had to browse through a fat dictionary to find out its meaning, now we can get it in milliseconds.
You get into a debate about something and it always ends with you googling about some fact. Information is easily accessible and technology is omnipresent. We reap the benefits of this every day in the form of convenience in our day to day lives but we all know that the price we are paying for this is through targeted ads, social media comparison and decreased attention span.
We no longer carry cash in our wallets. We rely on the internet for all our news. More & more, we realise we cannot live without our smartphones & laptops. Our dependency on technology has reached such a stage that we cannot imagine a world without it. But it lies on a very fragile base: one long electricity cut, one broken satellite or one data server getting corrupted may cause this entire framework to fall apart.
Knowledge is power. And who has knowledge about you decides who has power over you. Every social media company, every website you visit and every app you use is collecting data(knowledge) about you. They will then sell this data to data brokers who create a giant dataset about who you are as a person. This data is sold to advertisers. Once enough data is collected about you, they can start applying algorithms and data analysis to it. The result being they can predict your next move. They can predict very accurately how you will behave in a certain situation or how you will behave when you encounter a particular information/media. But the advertisers don’t care about this. What they really want from this dataset is what advertisement to show you to make you to buy something; what emotion to make you feel so you are primed to buy their product the next time you see it.
They pay huge money to the data brokers for the power to control you, and thus manipulate you into spending money. What they are actually stealing is not your data but your choice. Your choice of if you want to spend money on a particular thing or not.
Data privacy thus is a very important facet of our life that we have to pay more attention to. But we as a consumer/customer have very little sway on this matter. Most resources on the internet are behind paywalls. There was a time when most website or smartphone apps had a paywall where you had to pay money to access/use it, but now these seem to be replaced with a “data paywall.” Where you are asked to enter your email id, your mobile number and give up permissions of your smartphone usage to use that app. This way we are forced to give up our identity and our information to them.
The fact that you can scan someone’s UPI QR code and find out their name, bank and maybe even their email id (your google pay UPI ID has your google email-id in front of the @) seems very disturbing to me and the fact that most don’t care about this is surprising. Maybe because no one ever thinks about the implications and how can they, the cost of getting all the benefits of the digital world is a high-speed VUCA world which overwhelms you 24/7.
Imagine a random stranger asks you for your email id. How comfortable are you in giving out this information? Now imagine if this same stranger asks you for your mobile number. You would be a bit hesitant this time. Now let’s say they ask you for your address. Would you give it? But we never think like this while entering our personal data on websites and apps. And even when we give it to reputed sources, how safe is this data truly? Are we just one cyberattack away from losing all our privacy?
The feasible solution to the exploitation of our personal data is regulation. The GDPR, EU’s new data protection law, is a correct step to tackle this. It gives greater control over our personal data and imposes strict rules on organizations to ensure its security and also to make sure it’s not used for wrong purposes. We will also have to demand our government to create some kind of similar regulation that stops this illegal data collection and heavily penalise usage of data that can be used to manipulate human behaviour.
Author-
Advait Krishnakumar
Batch: 2024-2026
MBA-International Business
SIIB