Tuesday, November 23, 2010

A Privacy Law, Finally!

Today technological revolution and thence media has revolutionized the way things were being done. You can create news without waiting for a reporter from a famous news paper to come and interview you. Just make a MMS (no pun intended!), or a YouTube video or write on your blog...you can do all of it at virtually zero cost.

But these benefits of free speech and free thoughts come to society at a cost. This cost is the cost of privacy of individuals. A news paper (live mint) says, "Indian government is coming up with a privacy law, finally!" Sohas government really started worrying about the privacy of their citizens? Is it so? 

Let me do a reality check before we can think of such a possibility.

First of all, why we need a privacy law? After all, for things, which citizens don't do in general with their conscience, government creates a law! And law is something which compels individual to do things which would have been less interesting for them in the absence of a law! 


Leave this thought aside, my second curiosity is that, "How could government implement such a law?" Because we are talking about managing something, which exists in so many different forms and propagates through unlimited mediums, and which in itself is so fuzzy that nobody could define what does it mean by privacy to him! 

Let us be very practical...with the given tools that government has in hand today, forget about the implementations! Is the government going to stop Google by saying, 'Hey Google, you can no longer collect private data of our citizens!' or to the Banks, 'Hey, no profiling, segmenting, cross-selling anymore!'. 


If you have the above video, you would have come to the doubt that,  'Is anyone out there, who (if at all) is concerned about our privacy?' The answer seems elusive to me in this free world of ideas and thoughts...


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