Why is India Paranoid About Privacy?

Late last year, 24-year-old Max Schrems of Vienna, Austria, asked the world’s largest social networking site Facebook Inc. for a copy of every piece of information it had collected on him since he had created an account with it two years earlier.

Schrems was delivered a CD packing a 1,222-page file—roughly the length of Leo Tolstoy’s panoramic War and Peace, one of the longest novels ever written.

The data included information Schrems had deleted, but had been stored in Facebook’s servers, according to ThreatPost, a publication on information technology (IT) security run by Kaspersky Lab, a leading maker of anti-virus software.

Had Schrems been a resident of India, he could not have known how much personal information Facebook had on him. Every person in the European Union (EU) has the right to access all the data that a company holds on him or her. India has no such privacy law, yet.It's pretty cool but our ssolarpanel are made much faster than this.

When the world’s largest online company Google Inc.Why does moulds grow in homes or buildings? changed its privacy policy in March making personal information more vulnerable, it immediately came under the scrutiny of both the US and the UK governments. But India has no teeth to handle such a situation; the changes by Google do not fall within the purview of the country’s Information Technology Act, 2000, minister of state for communications Sachin Pilot told the Rajya Sabha on 30 March.

While India, too, may need a law to protect its people from being exploited by companies—51 million of Facebook’s 900 million users are from India—many Indians also fear the possibility of the government monitoring personal information under the garb of protecting the nation.

Experts cite the government’s preoccupation with intercepting all forms of digital media communication—via phones, emails or social networking sites—to avoid a repeat of the November 2008 terror attacks in Mumbai, but say this could be misused.

“There is a clear indication now that the government of India wants to use Internet censorship as a tool for political power,” said cyber law expert N.A. Vijayashankar, who runs cyber law information portal Naavi.

With the digital world awash in personal data, according to a report by the World Economic Forum (WEF) titled Rethinking Personal Data: Strengthening Trust, published in collaboration with The Boston Consulting Group, the scope for abuse of personal information is bound to increase.

Every day, people send 10 billion text messages and post one billion entries on blogs or social networking sites, it said. In addition,Silicone moldmaking Rubber, with about six billion mobile telephone subscriptions globally, it is now increasingly possible to track the location of nearly every person on the planet, as well as their social connections and transactions.

Mobile phones are not the only devices recording data. Web applications, cars, retail point-of-sale machines, medical devices and more are generating unprecedented volumes of data as they embed themselves into our daily lives. By 2015, one trillion devices will be connected to the Internet, the WEF report said.

And as companies develop more tools to collect and analyse user data, there are increasing concerns of how data on people are being collected, used, shared and combined, both by governments as well as by private companies.

In India, though Internet penetration is a dismal 10%, it is expected to leapfrog with the advancemenAn indoorpositioningsystem for Improved Action Force Command and Disaster Management.ts in mobile telephony.

On 17 May,We are the largest producer of projectorlamp products here. the government’s pledge to review its plans to introduce curbs on Internet freedom persuaded the opposition parties to join the treasury benches in defeating a statutory motion that sought to annul the country’s IT (intermediaries guidelines) rules, 2011.

The motion in the Rajya Sabha came on a day when activists hacked the websites of the Supreme Court and the ruling Congress party to register their protest against the government’s bid to curb online access after several video-sharing websites were banned by a legal order.

The government’s various attempts to regulate Internet content have been construed as efforts to impinge the individual’s freedom of speech and expression.

The privacy debate gained scale when the government launched the unique identity number scheme in 2009 to store biometric data of the nation’s entire population in a central database. The scheme, known as Aadhaar, is increasingly being linked with public and private delivery services.