By Atanu Biswas
The legacy of Justice KS Puttaswamy, who passed away in October, is entwined with the growing and constantly changing concern regarding privacy in today’s world. On the grounds that the United Progressive Alliance’s Aadhaar scheme breached citizens’ privacy, Justice Puttaswamy petitioned the Supreme Court in 2012. In 2017, a nine-judge Constitution bench headed by then Chief Justice JS Khehar upheld the Aadhaar scheme. Nonetheless, privacy was unanimously recognised as a fundamental right. However, to what extent do we, the common people, truly comprehend and, more significantly, cherish our own privacy?
In the context of American society, an article, “The Right to Privacy”, by Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis, published in the Harvard Law Review in 1890, was articulated primarily as a “right to be let alone”. Brandeis, who later served as an associate justice of the US Supreme Court during 1916-1939, described this right as “the most comprehensive of rights, and the right most valued by civilised men”.
Any discussion of “privacy” anywhere on the globe ought to include a reference to George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. A totalitarian regime was modelled in this book, and “surveillance” is a recurring theme therein. If we look at it from a modern standpoint, is that the mark of internet-driven and artificial intelligence (AI)-powered surveillance?
Joanna Stern, a Wall Street Journal columnist, explained in an April 2023 article how she replaced herself with an AI voice and video to see how human-like the technology can be. Her AI clone deceived her bank and her family, which led to unsettling repercussions. Therefore, in the age of social media and AI, the idea of privacy has been redefined. Carissa Véliz of the University of Oxford reveals in her 2020 book, Privacy is Power, how tech companies are harvesting and sharing our location, likes, habits, relationships, anxieties, and medical issues without our knowledge or consent. They are selling not just our data but also the ability to sway and make decisions for us and also for our connections and our fellow citizens. Privacy, thus, is as collective as it’s personal, perceived Véliz.
In Peter Weir’s 1998 film, The Truman Show, the 30-year-old Truman Burbank, who had lived his whole life in the completely fabricated seaside town of Seahaven Island where 5,000 cameras captured every move he made, was unaware that his life had been a TV show since the day he was born. Truman was unable to comprehend that he had no privacy at all. But as soon as Truman realised that he had no privacy in his life, he exploded in revolt.
This raises the question of whether or not we are born with a sense of privacy or if it’s a made-up idea. Some critics, however, think that The Truman Show affirms rather than challenges the media’s authority.
Scott McNealy, the CEO of Sun Microsystems, famously remarked, “You have zero privacy anyway,” around the same time in 1999. And Mark Zuckerberg is said to have declared, “Privacy is dead,” in 2010.
Given the advent of social media and AI, is privacy really dead today? Not really, perceives Neil Richards of Washington University, one of the world’s foremost authorities on privacy law. Richards begins his 2021 book, Why Privacy Matters, with “the privacy conversation”. As Richards believed, privacy is not dead. It’s simply how our society handles the social repercussions of the power that personal data gives to companies, governments, and other individuals who gather and utilise personal data.
Nonetheless, it’s indisputable that a great deal of personal data of citizens must be gathered and analysed, as well as that many laws must be framed and upheld, in order to plan for different aspects of society, national security, and sovereignty. Absolute privacy is at odds with that.
Therefore, the question of how much a country should know about its citizens and the Lakshman rekha beyond which it can be deemed to be infringing on someone’s privacy is complex and may differ from one society to another. This is once more reinterpreted over time, and with technological progress and evolving geopolitics.
But is privacy related to social networking, wearable technology, data breaches, and targeted advertising miscues — not to mention the Cambridge Analytica incident or the Snowden disclosures? Crucially, do we ever mistake “privacy” for “security”? They are definitely not the same, even though there may be a shadowy overlap.
Any appropriate personal data protection regulation may offer data security and safety as part of a comprehensive legal framework.
Indeed, our behaviour frequently doesn’t reflect how much we respect our privacy. The phrase “privacy paradox” was first used in 1998 to describe the phenomenon of online users claiming to be worried about their privacy but acting as though they are not. It describes the blurred barrier between private and public space on social media.
Is the idea of privacy a modern middle-class concept that results from relative financial success, urban life, and self-respect? However, the same contemporary civilisation that nurtures the need for privacy also produces the technology that enables its eradication very easily.
What does the future hold for privacy then? Nobody knows. However, Steven Spielberg’s 2002 film Minority Report chronicles the dystopia through the life of an officer in 2054 Washington, DC, who works in a special law enforcement unit that employs psychics, or “precogs”, to forecast future crimes.
People are arrested for anticipated future crimes. In contrast to Orwell’s world, the film shows a surveillance society of the future while illustrating the perils of biometric identification. And frequently, we don’t believe that goes against the idea of privacy.
As a result, privacy — the right to be let alone — becomes increasingly elusive, perhaps.
The author is Professor of statistics, Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata.
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