No market for privacy

The next station is Barakhamba Road. Please put on your clothes." Versions of this "metro announcement" have done the rounds since the CCTV footage of couples making out on the Delhi Metro was uploaded to the internet. Jokes apart, this footage was the latest in a long line of incidents underlining the insecurity of India's data environment and the selectively arbitrary ways in which laws are alternately ignored and abused.

The electronic distribution of pornography is illegal under Section 67 of the Information Technology Act. Here, government employees did the distribution. The footage came from time-stamped CCTVs in a high-security institution. By cross-checking CCTV time stamps with duty rosters, by old-fashioned interrogation, and checking on the online activity of the persons with access, it should be a relatively simple task to find the culprit(s). It hasn't happened of course, and it's unlikely to.

No official was punished earlier, in the far more serious incident, when 2,000-odd hours of wiretap recordings were leaked in the so-called Niira Radia tapes. Those recordings were gathered as evidence during investigations by employees of the home ministry. Stealing evidence and tampering with it are serious crimes.

The wiretaps were supposedly stored in a home ministry archive for which a senior police official was supposedly responsible. That individual should, at the very least, have been suspended, pending an inquiry. Once those responsible were identified, they should have gone to jail.

There have been multiple smaller incidents of this nature. Together these have created a moral hazard: members of the establishment can misuse access to data with impunity. They know they will not be punished, for the sarkar looks after its own. It is an open secret that if you know the right persons, you can, for the price of a bottle of mid-range single malt, record the mobile phone conversations and access the call records of almost anyone.

India doesn't have a privacy law. It has, at best, some protection in terms of the broadly undefined protection of personal liberty under Article 21. As a result, much highly sensitive and private electronic data are casually available. Private service providers sell customer databases openly for fixed rates. So do members of various government departments in a more negotiable market.

The government's access to your data will climb exponentially as the central monitoring system, or CMS, rolls out alongside Aadhaar and the National Population Register. It will jump several more notches, once the DNA profiling Act is passed.

Once CMS gets to work, "data analysis", as Salman Khurshid termed it, will enable a lot of blanks to be filled in. For example, CMS will enable an "analysis" of the surfing history, the emails, the call records and the physical locations of India's foreign minister and it will tie these to his financial records, and to similar information about his family and friends. I can think of a few people who might want to monetise this.

Once the market for CMS data settles down, the "data analysis" of politicians will most probably be available at fixed rates. The going rate for data analysis of Cabinet ministers might, for example, equate to an 18-year malt, while Opposition leaders would be worth 12-year malts and the random MP may even be available for the price of a low-end Scotch blend.

The aam aadmi's data will sell for the price of local whiskey, or perhaps even rum. You may think you don't use the internet. Your bank does, so does your credit card provider and the IT department. Your financial history is there. Your physical location is continually updated if you carry a mobile.

Apart from being "analysed", you could, at some stage, be jailed for emailing pictures of your trip to Khajuraho. Unless you're a sarkari employee of course. In that case, you can carry out your analysis, either in the name of patriotism or for personal pleasure and profit, without any fear of retribution.