If you think your mobile phone call to your girlfriend is just a person-to-person chat, you are mistaken. It’s not you calling your girlfriend, but your mobile phone calling your girlfriend’s mobile phone. Which means, you both are leaving a huge digital trail: the time, date, the content. The entire conversation is recorded and often snooped on.
You are under surveillance every moment. As a member of the sprawling global digital community, every step you take is being watched by the new Big Brothers — the State, non-State actors, corporate biggies, and hackers.
The result — the conventional idea of privacy has been thrown into the bin. And, the right to privacy has turned out to be just notional.
The breakdown of privacy walls under pressure from the digital dinosaurs — the Internet, e-mail, social media, mobile phones and CCTVs — and the resultant invasion of the individual’s private space was the topic of debate at a session ‘You are under surveillance’ at the Kerala Literature Festival (KLF) here on Saturday.
Cyber experts and academics debated the issue of privacy and snooping, particularly in the context of increasing encroachment on the private space by the State and corporates.
Vinod Bhattathirippad, cyber forensic expert, pointed out that snooping, legally and illegally by the State, and illegally by corporations and non-State actors, is a global phenomenon. The same phone conversation could just be data for one agency, information for another and evidence for yet another. C.S. Meenakshi noted that if you search for a sanitary pad on Google, the algorithm records you as a female and if you send a friend request on social media to a gay person, you are recorded as a person interested in gay sex.
T.V. Madhu and B. Rajeevan pointed out that the State’s invasion of individual privacy had expanded phenomenally in the digital age as new technologies allow easy snooping. Damodar Prasad, who moderated the debate, pointed out that while the State has shrunken privacy, the State secrecy, on the pretext of national security, has remained.
