Apar GuptaOver the past week Meta Platforms, which owns and operates Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has taken a big market hit. Its shares dropped 25%, wiping off at least $240 billion off its market capitalisation. As of Monday, this trend continued with another dip of 4.7%, a cumulative stock price fall of 30% since its earnings report for the fourth quarter of 2021.
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National security, at the cost of citizens’ privacy
After two years of deliberation, the Parliamentary Joint Committee on the Personal Data Protection Bill, 2019 (JPC) tabled its report this week. The recommendations are appended with a redrafted version of the law, named the “Data Protection Bill, 2021”. The constitutional principle of a data protection law has been set out in the Justice K S Puttaswamy judgment by the Supreme Court of India that reaffirmed the fundamental right to privacy. Justice D Y Chandrachud stated that the “creation of such a regime requires a careful and sensitive balance between individual interests and legitimate concerns of the state.” There are three clear reasons why the Data Protection Bill, 2021 tilts clearly in favour of the central government and against the fundamental right to privacy.
Pushback on Pegasus
The Supreme Court of India has appointed a committee presided by Justice (Retd.) R V Raveendran to inquire into the Pegasus revelations.
The judgment comes at a time when the principal author of the judgment and the Chief Justice of India N V Ramana, has noted, in the context of institutional independence, that when there is “a lot of discussion about the pressure from the executive, it is also imperative to start a discourse as to how social media trends can affect institutions.”
Here is a tacit acknowledgement of a general environment in which public trust is lacking in the judiciary. In this backdrop, the order of the court constituting the committee attains significance for three clear reasons.
Against Rules of the Game
Beyond such technicalities, the larger danger of the IT Rules glares through when the court observes that, “people would be starved of the liberty of thought and feel suffocated to exercise their right of freedom of speech and expression, if they are made to live in present times of content regulation on the internet with the Code of Ethics hanging over their head as the Sword of Damocles.”
Surveillance State
Last week, the Delhi government celebrated an act of mass surveillance, issuing a self-congratulatory press release, as reported in ‘Delhi ahead of NY, London in terms of CCTV cameras installed per sq. mile’ (IE, August 26). The press release marks the CCTV installation as a competitive metric based on a study by the consumer research website Comparitech. It notes that Delhi has 1,826 CCTVs per square mile, ranking it above 150 global cities. This statistic and the press release are symbolic of the populist messaging that comes at the cost of accountable governance.
Reshuffle and Digital Refresh
Left Out of Cowin
India is currently in the throes of a catastrophic second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, which has exposed the severe lack of our health infrastructure. Since March 2021, we have seen the situation spiral out of control to the extent that people are now left with no choice but to crowdsource life-saving drugs, oxygen cylinders and hospital beds on the internet. Technology is serving us during this crisis and it is natural for it to be viewed as a measure for vaccination. Here, the principal response has been through the CoWin portal that has been launched by the Government of India to digitise the vaccination drive. It is, however, resulting in vaccine exclusion and a lack of privacy.
Accountability with a Cost
In the polarised environment that we now inhabit, there are few public agreements. One of these rare instances is an agreement that social media is broken. For many commentators, this is an area that needs urgent government intervention. But the form and shape of this intervention becomes again an issue of adversarial contest and controversy. This issue is fundamental to how today’s information ecology operates as large Silicon Valley platforms have become gatekeepers of social behaviours and the tremendous power they hold is anti-democratic.
Shutting Down Digital Square
The growing digitisation of Indian society is reflective in the ongoing protests by farmers. Battles are being waged every day in gram sabhas and protest sites as well on social media. Each day on Twitter, a new hashtag trends for and against the farm laws, or farm leaders, or the promoters of leading Indian conglomerates, leaders of Opposition and even the Prime Minister. This conversation is public, chaotic but also democratic. In this adversarial contest, a recent government direction was issued to the social media platform, ordering it to shut down user accounts connected with these protests. This direction presents a clear breach of fundamental rights but also reveals a complex relationship between the government and large platforms on the understanding of the Constitution of India.
How not to tame the digital dragon
Earlier this week, on June 29, a dramatic press release was issued by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MEITY) directing a ban on 59 smartphone applications , many of them web services. This includes TikTok, a popular social media platform; the UC Browser, a preferred web browser for low budget smartphones; and CamScanner, which is used to convert images into shareable documents. In one fell swoop, this singular act of web censorship in India has impacted more people than ever before. Beyond the geopolitical and economic impact of this ban, concerning questions arise as to its legality and the measure’s impact on democratic norms.