Online privacy: Is staying offline the only way to fully secure it?

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. I remember an audience member once asked Justice B.N. Srikrishna a pointed question about privacy in the context of social media at one of the public consultations held in relation to his report on data protection.

“What happens," she asked, “when a group of friends takes a selfie and one of them uploads it onto social media? While we all may have agreed to pose for the picture, I did not consent to having it posted online. Is she obliged to obtain my consent before posting it? And how can social media companies make an image like this public if I haven’t agreed to allow them to do so? They certainly don’t have my consent and there are no other legitimate grounds they can avail off to process my personal information." That was the only time I’ve seen Justice Srikrishna at a loss for words. Even though he had, by then, spent countless hours deliberating all sorts of provisions that should and shouldn’t go into India’s draft privacy law, that question forced him to confront the complexity of networked privacy.

We have be trained to think of privacy as an individual right. Our laws have been designed to give individuals agency over their personal data—so that they get to decide who can process their personal data and for what. This is also why tech companies design privacy settings to be configurable at an individual level—so that users can determine what can and cannot be done with personal data.

But individuals have very little actual control over their privacy. In her book The Private is Political, Alice E. Marwick argues that given the deeply networked world we live in, individual agency is futile.