Have you read George Orwell’s 1984: A dystopian novel published in 1949, set in the year 1984, when the people of Great Britain, a province of a superstate named Oceania, became victims of perpetual war, omnipresent government surveillance and propaganda?
Hold on, now we are 34 years late, in 2018: Chinese authorities were able to locate and arrest a man attending a concert of more than 60,000 people using facial recognition technology. China has 170 million CCTV cameras already in use across the country, establishing the world’s largest camera surveillance network, which is anticipated to add millions more over the next few years that are likely to feature forms of artificial intelligence that will include more facial recognition options. Earlier this year, officers at the Zhengzhou East high-speed rail station were provided special glasses that were embedded with facial scanning technology. William Nee, China researcher at Amnesty International, warned that, “The potential to give individual police officers facial-recognition technology in sunglasses could eventually make China’s surveillance state all the more ubiquitous.”
On one hand, Our PM rightfully boasts that Aadhar implementation has weeded out fake beneficiaries of the porous public distribution system, subsidised gas connection and host of other services by identifying the targeted population saving huge amounts of public money. On the other hand, the public activists suspect ‘snake being smuggled in as rope’!
Is it time to accept the inevitable that debate about privacy is now just an academic exercise in futility? We have already traded it for the convenience and glamour of technology, be it UBER, FB, WhatsApp and host of other Apps., and no amount of carping will restore it. Under public pressure, governments will no doubt provide coating of sugar and make laws to try to protect it from corporate attacks; but the irony is, that in this matter where the interests of the state and the market converge, for reasons of security and profit, respectively, the loser is the freedom of the citizen. But Some may object as ‘unlimited freedom is synonymous with anarchy’!
Our own government’s obsession with it is a matter of concern: ‘The straws in the wind are not encouraging’, as Avay Shukla (Retd Addl Secy, HP) writes in a column in today’s Indian Express. It is significant that the new draft Privacy Bill proposed by the Srikrishna Commission has a clause which exempts the government from taking consent of the individual before accessing his personal information. The government has also proposed a law which will make DNA profiling of every citizen mandatory.
This can be dangerous for individual liberty in a country where even a speech in a university or a cartoon in a newspaper or a gig by a stand-up comedian is charged as sedition. So, let us face the reality: with Aadhaar, the big brother has arrived.
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