Bala Murali Krishna
Last summer, Vietnam passed a law that will, starting next year, force Facebook and Google — arguably the world’s two largest repositories of personal data, with 2.2 billion users each — to store within the country “important” personal data on Vietnamese users.
In contrast, India, a much larger country and the world’s largest free, social media market, has one policy that mandates government data to be stored in India, one directive from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) mandating localised storage of payments data, and one law for corporate financial data to be backed up locally.
Otherwise, it has no laws governing any other data, even though many policies have been proposed. One, for example, in 2014 sought to mandate email providers to locally store data of Indians, and emails between two people in India. Nothing came out of it. Even Justice BN Srikrishna’s draft Bill on privacy mandates local storage of data only in matters “critical to the nation's interests”.
Today, as a result, the data of over 300 million users of Gmail, nearly that number of Facebook users, and 200 million users of WhatsApp remain outside India — to be sliced, diced and sold to advertisers, political groups or even nation-state enemies. More importantly, Indians do not “own” this data. Instead, the data — deemed as precious as oil was in the old economy — is owned by corporations. It does not at this stage matter if it is foreign or Indian corporations.
Data localisation is an issue but a bigger one is data ownership, not to mention privacy. Clearly, India’s policymakers and lawmakers have given data little attention, blissfully unaware of the repercussions as they check their WhatsApp messages all day.
India’s richest man Mukesh Ambani, famous most recently for architecting the telecom company Reliance Jio and catapulting India to the era of superfast mobile data, jumped into the debate on data this week.
“Data colonisation is as bad as the previous forms of colonisation. Similarly, data freedom is as precious as the freedom we won in 1947,” he said at an event in Mumbai.
In a subsequent interview, the billionaire spoke about bringing back the data of Indians, perhaps in the manner in which Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke many years ago about bringing back the black money, or Congress Party leader Shashi Tharoor debated about reclaiming the spoils of British colonialism.
In folksy fashion, Ambani also compared data with the precious possessions we put in a bank locker, and should justifiably be able to reclaim. However, the operative part of what he said is this: “India has the opportunity to lead…in data ownership,” without regard to whether it is an Indian corporation or global corporation that usurps the data.
Ambani is not the first luminary to use the powerful term “data colonisation” to characterise what Google, Facebook and other companies are doing. Nandan Nilekani, the Infosys co-founder and architect of the Aadhaar programme, did it last year. In an op-ed article in the Mint, he used the term in warning about the “winner-takes-all scenario that stifles innovation and competition.”
We have reached such a data impasse. It is hard to imagine any other company, or for that matter countries, challenging Google and Facebook on their data bank. The data the two companies have amassed, and continue to do so, far exceeds that by law enforcement in any country simply because most liberal societies do not permit the kind of surveillance a simple smartphone has enabled.
It’s still not too late for India to act. Less than a fourth of the country’s population is tracked currently, and its data usurped, by the likes of Google and Facebook, and Amazon and Flipkart, which each has the shopping data of 150 million Indians.
What can India do?
Facebook can’t be trusted to protect data anymore. Ever since the Cambridge Analytica scandal, its strategy has been to say ‘sorry’ and go about its regular business. Even last week, its chief privacy officer, Rob Sherman, sought to upend the data localisation debate by throwing up “data protection” standards and certification.
Google might be better only in relative terms. It still will not relent on the way it tracks people and gathers data. It is far from clear when it obtains user consent, or informed consent, as opposed to forcing people to click on gobbledygook fine print.
Data localisation is a partial solution, but perhaps the easier and quicker one. It could likely be enacted and enforced in a year’s time. However, Facebook and Google could store all the data locally and operate just like today, given their army of engineering intelligence. To set better privacy standards, and achieve “data democracy”, Indian leaders will have to acquire real insights, and technological vision, in taming these data mercenaries, and in stopping an indigenous one from emerging.
For that war, what the country needs is not a former Supreme Court justice with high principles but perhaps a battle-scarred technologist with grassroots smarts.
Bala Murali Krishna works for a New York-based startup. Views are personal
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(Disclaimer: Reliance Industries Ltd. is the sole beneficiary of Independent Media Trust which controls Network18 Media & Investments Ltd.)
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