Beware the new Surveillance Raj that invades personal and political
July 24, 2021, 8:57 PM IST
The writer is an architect.
The first census of independent India — a 10-yearly survey — was conducted in 1951 to gather statistics on population distribution, gauge the status of housing, household income, education, etc. The idea was that it would help evaluate government programs, planning and policy decisions, and even aid business houses with information for marketing products. Surveyors appeared patiently at your doorstep and diligently recorded everything by hand.
Data collection was meant to improve lives not invade them.
Illustration credit: Uday Deb
Seventy years later, what began as a method of using information to enhance daily life is now a great sweeping tide of mass technological surveillance. This new form of public scrutiny has nothing of the slow meticulous scribbling into a sweaty ledger, but is instead like a lethal gas making its way into a crowded unsuspecting settlement. The recent Pegasus spyware case where governments allegedly spied on several activists, journalists and opposition leaders, among other private citizens, only demonstrates a deeply insidious and sinister intent. Without requiring permission, the lives of several private individuals are now on record somewhere in cyberspace, in a cloud or in an underground data facility.