The 21st century is also known as the Information Age and ever since the advent of this Information Age along with the internet, data and information have equally contributed to the advancement of technology. With the advancing technology, data and information are getting more and more important for both, the service providers and the users. There is no doubt that technology is helping humans in achieving things which earlier nobody thought of and is making their lives easier and better. But this growth in technology is often characterized by an unprecedented proliferation of communication and availability of information. However, the abundance of information also raises questions about the ethical value of digital privacy.

Digital privacy simply refers to the usage of the internet and connected devices without compromising your personal information. Basically, the protection of your sensitive personal information is what digital privacy is. But often, some questions like “why is there a need for protection?” and “from whom do we need this protection?” pop into our heads and these are some questions I am hoping to answer in this article. The widespread, easy and free access to the internet poses great threats to the users’ right to privacy. That is exactly what we need the protection from. The unauthorized usage of one’s personal data in order for someone to gain any type of advantage is nothing but a direct breach of an individual’s digital privacy.

There is a general perception that privacy is necessary to only those people who wish to hide something from the world. Often while discussing digital privacy, it is observed that people believe that they don’t need digital privacy because they are not doing anything wrong and they don’t have anything to hide. Having this misconception about privacy is common but at the same time, it is absolutely incorrect. Digital privacy or any type of privacy is not at all subject to someone having any secretive information or hiding anything. Digital privacy is simply a crucial human right that every individual should be entitled to. Regardless of region, age, nationality, everyone deserves the right to privacy as much as they deserve the right to life. But we have been users of the internet for at least 2 decades now, so why has there been a sudden buzz around digital privacy lately?

While the acceptance of privacy rights dates back to the latter half of the 20th century, the inception of digital privacy rights happened only during the early 2000’s. But it was not until 2013 when the whistle blower Edward Snowden unearthed some heinous surveillance programs of the US federal government which eventually made digital privacy concern for common people.

Soon after the tragic incidence of 9/11 terrorist attacks, the federal government of the United States passed a law called the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism act aka the USA PATRIOT act. This act was meant to strengthen the federal agencies working within the US to get better at countering terrorism by involving a vast and rigorous surveillance of suspicious activities. This also allowed the National Security Agency (NSA) to surveil doubtful individuals by eavesdropping on their domestic & international phone calls, messages and emails. Using the Patriot Act and the orders from US federal courts in the name of surveillance, NSA obtained legal orders asking network providers and internet service providers to share the information and data of their users as per their demand. This mass collection of communication data enabled the NSA to track communications made from and to the country so that they can keep an eye on it. The NSA always kept this program behind the curtains and whenever some questions were raised, they walked away from this on the basis of national security and lack of evidence.

This program was quietly working at its full potential up until 2013, but soon the American whistle-blower Edward Snowden, an ex-contractor for NSA surveillance program, with the help of Glenn Greenwald, a journalist at The Guardian and the documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras released a set of classified documents related to the PRISM project in the public eye. PRISM project involved use of companies like AOL, Microsoft, Google, Apple, Yahoo!, Facebook and many more such giants for this surveillance program at NSA. This also revealed the involvement of the FIVE EYES alliance comprising of countries like the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada using the same system.

This shocking revelation made by Edward Snowden triggered a huge backlash and criticism of the governments across the globe for surveilling their own citizens under the suspicion of terrorism. This eventually led to the US Govt pulling back these provisions of the USA PATRIOT act in 2015. This whole series of events caused a stir among the people globally, regarding their digital privacy and the lack of legal protection against the misuse of their sensitive information. Many governments introduced their Digital Privacy Protection policies in the subsequent years. Notably, India is yet to introduce its independent laws and legislation regarding digital privacy.

Well, all these actions are taken post that incidence might have reduced the powers of governments to surveillance our data and information but still, there is a need for Digital Privacy in the current scenario. In fact, from here, the need for digital privacy is going to keep increasing. As we are progressing towards artificial intelligence and machine learning and their increasing involvement in daily life, the security of our sensitive data is getting more and more important. To explain a bit about why digital privacy is a hot topic currently, let’s first take a look at Personally Identifiable Information PII is basically the minimum information that can be used to distinguish or trace an individual’s identity either alone or when combined with other personal or identifying information that is linked or linkable to a specific individual. Data used as PII ranges from sensitive information like your bank account details, tax record, medical records, passwords, etc. to non-sensitive information like your family background, date of birth, sexual orientation, etc. Any combination of this data can lead up to the unique identification of an individual. The current technology platforms with digital tools like cell phones, the internet, and social media have changed the way businesses operate and governments legislate. There has been a burst in the supply of all types of data, which is often termed as Big Data. It has gifted the companies the wealth of information. Businesses are able to compare detailed insights of their customers and are able to offer personalized experiences. The emergence of big data has severely increased the opportunities for exploiters of data who find this information valuable. There have been a lot of debates and concerns raised about how these companies handle the information of their customers

On top of that, it is often found that cybercriminals attack data systems to access the PII and sell this valuable information to various digital marketplaces which further can be used for some of the other benefits. And again for the protection of the interests of consumers, digital privacy rides right back into the picture because no individual would want or like their personal data being used for the benefit of some other company or individual.

Data: The Gold of 21st Century

Understanding the value of our own data will make us appreciate why there is so much emphasis given to maintaining digital privacy, nowadays in almost every sphere of life. If this was not enough for you to realize the need for digital privacy, let’s take a look at some real-life scenarios where the lack of digital privacy is exploited for benefits.

Google Ad Personalisation

It was one of the top Google executives who once answered a question asked about Google’s revenue model and the free offering of its services like Google search, Gmail, etc. by saying “If you are not paying for it, you are not the customer, you are the product.” What the exec actually meant then, can be clearly seen in implementation these days in our daily lives. This is where I would like to reiterate that the over-involvement of artificial intelligence and machine learning is making it difficult to maintain digital privacy. On a daily basis, we use many services and applications which use some type of machine learning algorithms to make things look so simplified, be it the mere autocomplete feature of Google search or the vast services like virtual voice assistant or even the recommendations on YouTube. We find it so comforting to have everything around us personalized as per our choices and convenience, but have we wondered why we are not paying anything for such a wonderful personalized experience? Well, the answer is simple, we are not paying anything because we are not the customers, we are the products (rather our data) being sold.

This is where I want you to spare a second and follow this link (google.com/settings/ads) and use your personal Google account to take a look at what Google knows about you. Shocked, aren’t you?? This collection of data is solely based on your internet activity and behaviour, some of you might even find some information there which you have never disclosed in public. And did you notice the name of service you found this information under? Yes, this data is used for the “Google Ad Personalisation” service, which means this data is sold by Google itself to various advertisers to make the ads more appealing to us based on our recent activities. This will increase our chances of availing those services which eventually are benefiting those companies. Adding to that, this was just the small component of your data that Google has, which it is willing to disclose to you, that too very discreetly. Well, this was just one of the tech giants in the world, which controls the majority of internet interactions and has built the operating systems for a huge chunk of mobile devices across the globe. But Google is not alone in doing this, to see that now let's talk about another giant.

Facebook - Cambridge Analytical 2018

At this point in the discussion, it would be wise to turn our eyes to one of the biggest online social communication forums: Facebook. Facebook is a very famous social networking platform mainly popular among the millennials where people are fearlessly sharing their personal details and daily activities. Despite having found its name in the PRISM surveillance program, Facebook never took the security of its users’ personal information seriously. In 2018, it came out that over 50 million Facebook users had their data exposed to a company called Cambridge Analytica, the company which was later accused of selling the data for political consulting during the general elections. It was totally unprecedented to use someone’s information on Facebook for political analysis and based on that influencing their votes. It meant that not only for monetary benefits but also for political advantages and misuse of power, our personal information can be used against us. Many people were left baffled posts in this episode and it also made people wonder whether they should continue using Facebook or not, as a result of which Facebook faced a huge number of account closures during that time. Many of their employees lost the trust in their company and resigned from the company. The legal procedure following this forced Facebook to modify its privacy policy and take preventive measures against such data leaks. Well enough of the past, now let's discuss something very recent and very relatable.

WhatsApp Privacy Policy Change

Not so long back ago; every WhatsApp user received a notification regarding the changes in the privacy policy of the said app. And this updated privacy policy left people worried about their data that WhatsApp is going to access. Well, to clarify a little bit on the changes WhatsApp introduced (clearing out a few misconceptions you might have), the whole update was only to accommodate the whole ad personalization program. Basically, WhatsApp has clearly stated that the individual chats will still remain end-to-end encrypted, it's just that they will be collecting and sharing your other data like the device you are using, your locations, search history, etc. with Facebook, which is already gaining mistrust among masses. Apparently, this is still a lot because WhatsApp was planning to introduce ads in the app after successfully gathering the information, which again will put our personal data into the vicious cycle of personalized adverts. But after facing some backslash for this move, WhatsApp has temporarily stalled this updated privacy policy for a few months. Going through all these above examples and cases, one thing is pretty clear that these huge tech giants are selling our data for their benefits. But the funny thing here is that these giants are doing everything by staying within their limits. In fact, in all the cases we discussed above, no company is violating its own privacy policies. They all have clearly stated everything which they are doing in their respective privacy policies which most of us never even care to read. But all the misuse and leaks are happening because of some loopholes present in them, which companies like Cambridge Analytica are exploiting. Well, actually using past experiences to learn and improve has always been the path of betterment, so using the user data to make their products better and improve user experience is actually not a bad practice. But using it without their knowledge raises some questions on their ethical integrity. Hence, transparency enters the scene. Transparency between the service provider and consumer is a necessity for maintaining digital privacy. If people would know what type of data will be collected then only they can have full control over the access of their data. To the readers who were unaware of the severity of digital privacy, I hope some of the aforementioned cases have made a positive impact on your perception of digital privacy. But at the same time, considering how deeply rooted the internet is in our daily life and how helpless we feel sometimes without it, does it make you question how realistic it is to achieve digital privacy? So….

Is Digital Privacy really a myth, or can we actually win this raging war?

Yes, we totally can! Digital privacy is not at all a myth; although it might seem farfetched it is totally achievable. It's just about following the right practices and keeping an awareness of the data you are using on the internet. There are a lot of practices followed by people around the world to improve their digital privacy and I am going to list a few here. So here’s what you can do:

1. First and foremost thing is, never just skip and accept the privacy agreement of apps and websites. At least take an overview of it noticing what types of data will be shared and collected from you.
2. De-Google-ify your life. This practice is gaining popularity lately. This basically involves shifting your work to the outside of the ecosystem of Google services by using alternatives of these services like using Mozilla Firefox or Brave Browser instead of Google Chrome, DuckDuckGo instead of Google Search, etc. The main motive is to decentralize all your data from going to one single company and instead of distributing it among many so that individually they can’t create large data profiles for you.
3. Always follow safe browsing practices like accessing only the secure and verified websites and apps, using strong passwords, not opening unusual email attachments, using a secure internet connection, using a VPN, etc.
4. Another major step is to evaluate the current privacy setting of the apps like WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, etc. which you are using currently on your phone and adjust them accordingly. Adding to that, adjusting the permissions granted to various apps for using device resources is also an important step to identify what type of data a particular app can access and is accessing.
5. Simply try to reduce the usage of your sensitive data on the internet.

And there are many more such practices followed by people which can be used to reduce one’s digital footprint.

The Internet is now used in almost every aspect of our lives; in fact, it plays an important role in it nowadays, which makes it such a powerful tool. But by quoting the Peter Parker Principle, “With great power comes great responsibility” I would like to conclude by saying that being vigilant about Digital Privacy is not hard. It is well within the reach of everyone by simply using the internet with some added responsibility and extra awareness.