“24-7. EVERYTHING THAT IS HAPPENING in your house. There is Alexa, Siri TV, all listening to you. And this is all useful data. They know what you’re doing the whole day,” remarked advocate Murali Neelakantan, speaking at a seminar ‘Our Data, Their Wealth: Why Privacy Is the New Currency’, organised by Moneylife Foundation in Mumbai. The Leaflet had joined in as a media partner.
Neelakantan, who has served as the Global General Counsel of global pharmaceutical companies Cipla and Glenmark in the past, opened the seminar with a series of questions: How many in the audience were receiving WhatsApp messages from unknown numbers? How many had used their phone numbers to make UPI payments instead of scan codes, or to enter building complexes through apps like MyGate or ApnaComplex? How many had CCTV cameras in homes, offices or schools? How many had given blood tests that cost Rs 1000 that analysed lipid, kidney or liver function? And, how many used Google Maps every day?
“I am just reminding you of how generous you have been in giving away something that was private,” Neelakantan explained, adding later that privacy was “not about having something to hide; it is about control over your life. Most people say, ‘I have nothing to hide, so why should I care about privacy?’ But privacy is not about hiding; it is about control — over your choices, your information and your life.”
Emphasising that people need to be more conscious about how their behaviour was translating and being stored as data, he urged audience members to also ask how this data was being stored. “Somebody came up with this great idea that data is the new oil,” he remarked, explaining that it was, though an initially exciting idea, including for him, it was truthfully a worrying concern, since oil was produced from dead living organisms, and similarly data’s extraction was at the cost of people who were not set to benefit from it. Data was similar to oil, he explained, in the sense that, “The ones who own it never benefit. The ones who collect it, mine it, purify it and sell it are the ones who are going to benefit.”
Understanding this dynamic, Neelakantan explained, was crucial for enabling behavioural changes among people. He revealed, for instance, that he himself rarely gave out personal information, including mobile numbers, and that refusing to share data had not caused him any inconvenience, to counter the common argument that people today feel “compelled” to share data, which is why they cannot stop doing it.
The consequences for Indians, he explained, were dangerous - for instance, medical data by diagnostic labs which were conducting full body tests at throwaway prices, could track age, gender, blood profile, and health conditions of lakhs of users, which was “immensely valuable for companies, insurers and data brokers.”
Neelakantan explained that basic caution could be critical in such cases: by not clicking impulsively, and never sharing personal or banking details, one could avoid major scams, by using privacy-oriented browsers such as DuckDuckGo or Firefox instead of Chrome and Safari, and using a virtual private network (‘VPN’) to mask one’s location while using internet, by not sharing Aadhaar details except where legally required, such as linking them with PAN or for EPF transactions, by adopting password managers instead of reusing easy-to-guess passwords, by avoiding storing all documents in platforms like DigiLocker, and by thinking twice before posting personal photos and travel details online, privacy could be truly protected, as a property and as an aspect of life and liberty.
“If we start thinking of our personal information as our property and as an aspect of life and liberty, we may begin to treat it with more care,” Neelakantan said. “It’s not just data — it is your digital identity.”
In reference to India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, Neelakantan explained that while the law was a step in the right direction, it lacked detailed rules and enforcement mechanisms, which meant that individuals had to still rely on awareness and caution to protect themselves. “Laws can only go so far. Until people themselves value their privacy, nothing will change,” he observed.