We have learnt about the need to stop business through surveillance from the recent disclosure of startling facts by Facebook’s former employee Frances Haugen as to how Facebook and its employees knew and debated internally that its business model requires to ensure that the users of the social media platform spend hours before the screen and how at the same time it was aware that the platform was designed to enhance the user engagement which will definitely lead to cause the otherwise-avoidable social harms.
The wish and endeavour to control the consequences of hate speech are limited to a few regions in the northern part of the globe and to a few languages with tiny markets and limited effect. However, in the other parts of the world, the involvement and the role of various vested interest groups in using social media to incite violence and social unrest and use it for benefit and for business has been quite too rampant. The efforts to enhance user engagement brings with it an array of harms right from exposing children to violence and pornography to affecting their mental health through various disturbing posts and engagements.
But fact remains that the issue is not confined to the faults of Facebook only but to every stakeholder, who have chosen to remain as mute spectators of the entire process.
The business design, of which we are accusing Facebook to have adopted and which has caused in promoting and amplifying various social harms is actually adhered to and practised by almost all social media companies, online retailers, telecom operators and financial companies. All of them aim, wish and make strategic planning to enhance user engagement over various social media platforms with the many kinds of apps and devices available today.
The creepiest part of the entire story is that the devices capture huge amounts of information about the individual behaviour of the user throughout each and every moment of his or her engagement.
And that the information so collected is used to influence us and can be used by private entities to promote their businesses to the extent of detriment to the society and by the government to control us.
This practice is both dangerous from the point of fair competition in the market and is anti-democracy too because ruling regimes at various times having greater access to such information may devise policies to influence public opinion so as to unfairly tilt it in their favour.
Therefore, the obvious aim should be to have access to all the services without anyone sitting over us and watching and recording our movements and behavioural patterns and subsequently control us or to sell us targeted advertisements.
Post the Puttaswamy judgment by the Supreme Court, right to privacy is now a fundamental right, even to be exercised against the state. However, it is essential that in order to ensure it is duly adhered by both private players and government alike, we mustn’t leave it to be taken care of by lawyers and judiciary rather by a conscious citizenry determined to protect the democracy through democratic means. We must reject the ‘business through surveillance’.
No one should be allowed to play with our personal data, be it by private parties like social media companies or aggregators, government agencies, finance or retail companies. The business atmosphere should be controlled to that extent. There is no problem in an informed survey through internet or by using social media platforms but sneaking into our lives through the devices in our hands purchased through our own hard-earned money for our benefit is both illegal and immoral.
It is essential to protect our right to privacy from the predatory data practices, which is essential for a healthy democracy and fair competition in the market.
Otherwise, it shall not be too late when our lives will be remote-controlled by big companies and social media giants and our ballot will be subservient to their wish and the government will be slave to their whims and designs.
(The writer is an Additional Central Government Standing Counsel, Central Administrative Tribunal, Cuttack Bench, and a Distinguished Adjunct Professor of Law and Media Studies at School of Mass Communication, KIIT University. He can be reached at sjyotiranjan3@gmail.com. Views expressed are personal).