Abhilasha Semwal, Deputy Manager-Research & Events at Sanrachna, SGT University is a B.A.LL.B graduate from Law College Dehradun and Masters of Law in Business Law from Amity University, Noida. She has a total experience of 7 years out of which 6years she has worked as an Assistant Professor at Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University, Delhi.
Divyansh Sehgal, Legal Research Associate at Sanrachna, SGT University is a B.A.LL.B graduate from Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University, Delhi and Masters of Law in Intellectual Property (IP) from Amity University, Noida.
People are found to be sensitive towards something they find inherently special or private. Privacy is understood as the ability of an individual or group to isolate themselves or any information of themselves from others. It allows them to express selectively.
The concept of privacy in the modern construct is primarily associated with western culture. In the business world, people sometimes voluntarily share personal details to receive some sort of benefits. But it was frightening to know that the voluntarily shared information was misused and which lead to identity theft.
Edwin Lawrence Godkin wrote in the late 19th that’ nothing is better worthy of legal protection than private life’. It’s the right of every man to keep his affairs to himself and to decide the extent they should be known to other people. Privacy is understood to have an option to maintain secrecy. Richard Posner said that privacy is the right of people to “conceal information about themselves that others might use to their advantage.” When privacy is discussed as secrecy, an individual keeps some information private while they choose to make other information public and hence it does not apply for any information which is already disclosed publically.
What is Privacy?
Privacy is a fundamental human right that underpins human dignity and other key values such as freedom of association and freedom of speech. After the case of K.S Puttaswamy (Retd.) Union of India (2015) 8 SCC 735 in 2017, the Right to privacy has been instituted in the constitution as a fundamental right under Article 21. Moreover, Privacy is an undisputed right of an individual comprehensively bonded with his/her life. It becomes a matter of controversy when it is mishandled/misused unlawfully by erroneous individuals.
As defined by the Privacy Board of New York privacy refers to “a form of respect given to individuals of a free society, i.e. the basis of free society here means that we get to engage with the world on our terms.
Whether the “Right to Privacy” is enshrined in the constitution as a fundamental right?
Article 21 of the Constitution of India provides that “No person shall be deprived of his life or personal liberty except according to the procedure established by law”
Privacy is a serious matter of concern as the number of users online is increasing every day. The global internet penetration rate has increased from nearly 17% in 2005 to over 53% in 2019. An estimate of around 4.1 billion people was using the internet in 2019 who had a 5.3% increase as compared to the last year.
Source: Measuring digital development Facts and figures, 2019
ARE YOU ONLINE SAFE?
As the number of internet users is increasing every day and are dependent on online services for many day-to-day activities. A web browser irrespective of being used on a personal desktop or a mobile device or a smart television allows users to access new websites, have their financial information, personal information, location, etc. which is in the public domain without the consent of the data principal.
Google Chrome, a free web browser that came into the market in 2008, is one of the leading web browsers in the world with having more than half of the population of the world or the market share of browsers. Google’s sole focus is on advertising and it is also known as the biggest advertising company which has a similar structure as surveillance software. While Google Chrome will request an unlimited number of cookies which will retain the personal which can include their financial information, login details, passwords, gender-related information of the online user, but Mozilla Firefox will block them automatically. Google after gathering all information from the unblocked cookies creates a database of all the data which helps in building individual profiles including people’s interests, income, personality and all information which is either personal or non-personal.
Safari on the other hand which is used on all IOS devices (iPhone, Mac, etc.) also has “intelligent tracking protection” for cookies in 2017 which uses an algorithm to ascertain which cookies are bad and which cookies have to be kept into the web browser.
Edge browser, on the other hand, sends data (URLs) that an online user visits in an un-obfuscated form that could enable to track the sites which an online user visits. Edge communicates with Microsoft’s SmartScreen, Microsoft Defender and malware protection components bundled into the browser, and it does so in such a way that un-hashed information is sent over a secure connection which includes URLs as well as the user’s security identifier (SID)2 which is unique in every web browser of the site being visited by an online user.
Cambridge Analytica Case, an eye-opener to the world, because of which the other vital questions emerged, such as how Facebook gave special data deals to devise makers or why and how does google tracks people’s location even if the location services are turned off? A company called Cambridge Analytica had purchased Facebook’s data on tens of millions of people (Americans) without their consent, to build a ‘psychological warfare tool’ which reflected on US voters to help elect Donald Trump as president. After gathering the data, they could predict people’s personalities and other sensitive details from their freely accessible Facebook likes only because Facebook had allowed third-party apps to access data on their users.
Moreover, India has also experienced losses due to the case of Cambridge Analytica, Facebook has almost 20 crore users in India out of which 335 people were affected and 5,62,120 users were potentially affected as they were the friends of those 335 users in the data theft case.
Not just the web browsers, mobile applications also do share user’s personal information to the 3rd parties as it has access to our location, storage, microphone, email, social media accounts information, etc. These are the top 4 dangerous permissions which are taken by the applications
Source: THE ARRKA STUDY, 2018
Today we are at a similar intersection with data technology. Aadhar is one of the examples in many ways in which we began to use data in every possible thing we do. Though it made things far easier to avail services from the private enterprises and government but at the same time it made a humungous amount of data available which can be misused and worse-used without consent.
What we really need is a new framework or are the current statutory provisions sufficient?
