Protect privacy, don’t trade it for convenience

After sharing all our personal data on social media, is privacy an afterthought for Indians?

It is high time we control technology before it starts controlling us

Unless one is living in a cave, by now we must all be aware of the sordid Facebook saga. Each passing day more and more muck hits the ceiling. Facebook is turning into a repeat offender and there is a global fatigue that has set in. It is accused of spreading hatred and genocide in Myanmar, according to a UN assessment. Facebook is also believed to have influenced the Brexit vote in Britain and the US election results.

To recall, this columnist had, at the beginning of the year, predicted that shunning social media platforms would become trendy and the new cool. It was, therefore, least expected that this prediction would be spot-on and arrive so soon. The hashtag #deletefacebook is trending on the social media. Elon Musk deleted his companies’ (SpaceX and Tesla Facebook) pages. WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton advocated deleting the application too and many celebrities followed suit.

We would rather not go into the complicated details of the latest episode involving privacy breach of users. Several countries and Parliaments are hotly debating the consequences and are preparing to grill Facebook for its role. The embattled CEO Mark Zuckerberg displays bewilderment at each occurrence. The social media platform seems to suffer from systemic mismanagement. Its lack of control, transparency and reluctance to view the scale of the damage points to a pattern where the rot in the culture of the company is all too evident.

What will be interesting to see is: Will Facebook crawl out of this self-inflicted mess or end up going up in flames like other social media platforms in the past, such as Orkut and Myspace? Facebook has seen dizzying growth that a typical company takes at least a couple of decades to achieve. It grew too fast and too soon for its own good. When you scale up into a global operation, there is no room for misjudgments and naivety.

Some of our own politicians and policy-makers have become cheerleaders of these transnational platforms. They like to wear it as a badge of honour and are eager to hobnob with the poster boys of the digital world. The media, to a large extent, has not performed its role; nor has it taken an active interest in understanding the business model and questioning the socio-political and cultural dimensions of the social media platforms and their ramifications in the larger civic and public interest. That is until things started to tumble out. Strangely, there is no regulatory body fluent in the digital space in India yet.

It is hard to imagine that we couldn’t see what China has seen all along. It has indigenously developed social platforms. It didn’t let the foreign-run social media platforms set its foot on its territory and, instead, favoured home-bred platforms.

In the entire privacy debate, the fundamental question remains how much data the end user is willing to trade? What is more important for the user — the brand trust or utility? Isn’t every other app residing on our devise collecting data? For that matter, how different are Indian apps, money wallets and private entities and service providers such as telecoms, ISP etc? What about the data they collect?

India lacks a culture and sensitivity towards privacy. A lot of people are still casual about their social media behaviour. No questions are asked when an unrelated application needs  access to all our personal data. Unwittingly, we  surrender all information to these social media platforms which otherwise we would not share even with our near and dear ones.

We need a new set of rules and regulations that govern on how much personal information is required to conduct meaningful transactions on these digital platforms. Personal information needs to have some modicum of sanctity and protection. There are few takeaways for Facebook, policymakers as also end users from this sordid saga:

From a product standpoint, Facebook should have stuck to its core product idea which is ‘building communities’. Instead, it went on to add an array of whistles and bells and unrelated features in its quest to become a one-for-all platform. Thanks to the pervasiveness of the platform, the core product got distorted and many actors used it and abused it, resulting in a spate of unintended consequences. The lesson for Facebook is to stick to the DNA of its product. Else, it will wallow in self-pity for not recognising the creature it created in the first place.

When a product is created, the creator needs to own all its myriad fallouts as well. Checks and balances are essential so that the platform is not infiltrated. In this case, an all-pervasive platform bequeathed the controls to third-party app developers and actors and they ran amok harvesting granular level data of the end users. The irony is the user’s interest was neither at the front or center but was last in the order of priority when it came to business and profitability. The user never felt protected and respected in the entire scheme of things.

From a business point of view, companies, who take their license to operate for granted, are soon taught a lesson. The heavy hand of regulation is not very far. Apart from global opprobrium and reputational damage, users will veer away from the product for being untrustworthy.

Facebook PR fiasco and crisis communications are one of the best examples of how not to do things when hit by a crisis. The state of denial, irresponsible statements, unresponsive leadership bidding time and flippant initial reactions points to the depth and seriousness of the problem where, in every controversy, the company tries to deflect, hide and then try to figure out right solutions for its missteps.

For Governments, any external platforms emanating from abroad and playing a determining role in shaping the socio, cultural fabric of the society needs to be examined. These platforms, by their very nature, by-pass the conventional checks and balances and, hence, the threat of misuse is much higher as is evidently clear.

There is a need for a global protocol on privacy, ownership of the users’ data and the transnational traffic. There needs to be a common code for all nations. Private enterprises need to be subjected to rules and conventions that respect sovereign law of the land and boundaries.

The time to resurrect the debate between private interests vs public good has reappeared. Policymakers have been caught napping on this. There have to be stringent rules governing on what kind of data should be in the hands of the private players and strict penalties should be imposed for any breach of trust.

From a user’s standpoint, the lesson for all of us is to employ common sense and vote with our feet when brands trade our safety and interests for profitability.

Let us not trade privacy for convenience.

(The writer is a communications and management professional with cross-sectoral experience)