Facebook’s brave new world: What India needs to ensure internet is not only free but also fair

I have an honest confession to make – i rarely read the terms and conditions or privacy policies of any websites that i visit or apps that i download. The policies are unintelligible, confusing and replete with legal jargon. Moreover, most policies are of a take-it-or-leave-it fashion – if you want the service, you must agree to its terms, most of which provide no option for negotiation.

A combination of temptation for the service and belief in the good faith of the service provider means that every time i part with personal information online, i know that i am possibly signing away my right to keep my personal life private. But i do it nonetheless – after all, what could possibly happen?

The startling revelation that Cambridge Analytica had access to personal data of over 87 million Facebook users is how the chickens come home to roost. This includes data, according to a recent response by Facebook, of over 5 lakh Indians. Through an application which allowed access to Facebook friends of all its users, Cambridge Analytica could build detailed profiles which were then used to send specifically targeted messages, to influence the last American presidential election.


This was facilitated by Facebook which, between 2007 and 2014, allowed third party apps to access large amounts of personal data of Facebook users, with the consent of the user. Mark Zuckerberg has now apologised for this “breach of trust”, though his lawyers had argued before that nothing was done without user consent.
To blame Facebook for its permissive privacy policy, or the user for providing her consent casually would be missing the wood for the trees. The real culprit is a lax regulatory environment that astonishingly deems large-scale, unethical data sharing to be legal.

This is because the cornerstone of the digital economy is user consent. After all, consent is an expression of autonomy and historically the surest basis for any economic activity. But the operation of consent today is a far cry from its lofty philosophical foundations.

Here are some real examples on how consent works – a music provider app tells you that to access certain services, you may have to provide your sexual orientation; a shopping website says that your personal information will be used for marketing purposes; several service providers categorically state that if you use a Facebook account to login, they will have access to your personal information on Facebook, even if you have not shared that information publicly on Facebook.

Each of these terms is one-sided and if users were invested with real choice, they might not have consented to them. But users regularly consent, seldom having even read these terms. This allows companies to disclaim liability, despite the practices being surreptitious and consent being uninformed.

This fig leaf, which passes in the name of consent, has perpetuated on account of several large companies successfully having lobbied against any significant state regulation. So successful have their lobbying efforts been, that it is unthinkable today to envisage an internet where people actually read privacy policies or where websites are liable for providing a platform to individuals to spew venom at each other.

This hands-off approach of the state is advocated in the name of freedom – that the internet has been transformative because it is unfettered. While that may have been true when the internet started, as the Cambridge Analytica exposé reveals, the real beneficiaries of the unmitigated freedom on the internet today are the companies and the trolls, not the average user.

Though difficult, it is imperative to understand the changed internet of our times. While it remains a massively empowering tool for individuals to read, share and transact, on the coat-tails of such empowerment has emerged a giant data mine containing individual likes, dislikes, prejudices and predilections with a seemingly undiminishing memory.

Companies and countries of various hues are now competing to seize a share of this mine to sell products that they think users may like, spy on persons of interest and interfere in elections. The same technology that allows Facebook to trawl through your pictures to find the best ones for you to reminisce about at the end of the year, makes such nefariousness possible.

In the global regulatory context of this changed internet, there exists an India-sized void. Unlike other countries which have acted to secure their own interests over the last decade, India has chosen to wait-and-watch. This procrastination, perhaps unintended, paradoxically has presented us with an opportunity – to act on the basis of what the internet is, and is becoming, rather than what it was.

India must, if its laudable objective of being a digital leader in the 21st century is to be a reality, act to ensure that the internet is not just free, but it is also fair, genuinely empowering the farmer to avoid the middleman, the local entrepreneur to secure a quick loan and the child to access her textbooks, no hidden strings attached.

Strong rules to ensure informed consent, greater accountability for data breaches and liability for platforms for content, might be good places to start. If India does so, it might become a model for the global south to follow. Such a model is our best hope to cope with the brave new world that the Facebook episode demonstrates, which is no longer a distant future but rather our frightening present.

DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author's own.