The internet is a bottomless ocean of information. Its biggest platforms, which obviously are also the most influential because so many of us use them, are dependent on collecting and selling user’s data. We knew that long before Mark Zuckerberg's humbling mea culpa moment before a Congressional committee. But then we always tend to think data breaches and leaks affects someone else and not us and we convince ourselves to let things be. After all, what is cheaper than using the internet?
Imagine the shock when it hit me for the first time that we can take nothing for granted. I had dropped my mobile phone while walking and cracked the Gorilla glass. And what is better than Googling to know how to fix it and what it would cost etc. My queries were strictly to Google. And then came a very helpful mail from Amazon suggesting the purchase of what it called a protective casing for a OnePlus 3 mobile. Amazon recommends “Spigen K…Rugged Armor for OnePlus 3”.
How on earth did Amazon know I had cracked the Gorilla glass and was now suggesting protective measures? I had not searched on the Amazon app for protective armour for my mobile and only watched a video on a Google search on fixing the glass. This was a bit eerie and my worst suspicions seemed to point to how we are indeed living in an Orwellian nightmare come true age in which you can't so much as scratch the nose without a mail popping up suggesting some medication for a bruised body part.
Just consider the kind of information we are giving away on the net just because Facebook, Google and their ilk charge us nothing and merely want to know everything about you and if possible your horoscope too as you sign up for services or just to gain some knowledge or just look up to clear a doubt, of which we have more and more as our brain ages along with our body. As if to reinforce my fear of a nebulous Big Brother comes the news in the day's newspaper from somewhere in the western world that the new devices coming along might be spying on you.
Take the cute new Alexa, the Amazon marvel of a virtual assistant, which (or who) knows everything from last night's sports results to the latest news and the widest collection of music. Apparently, Amazon has filed a patent for its predictive behaviour by which it could possibly book a table for you even as you mention on the phone to someone your desire to go out to dine. This patent is presumably for the future but then eavesdropping is trying to find a sneaky way into the household and the world is just watching. Or, maybe, such tech is already there as smart TVs are said to be as capable of conveying your conversations to someone out there who thinks it is worth listening to.
How much wiser are we, or the US Congressional Committee for that matter, on what this battle for privacy means to the average internet user? He may have been dressed in a business suit in a subtle message that Mark Zuckerberg needs the Establishment now to keep his users and his billions. It remains to be seen whether he makes any more than the minimal changes to offer cosmetic corrections to satisfy his inquisitors.
Mark seemed to squirm more when the House of Representatives got at him. But then we must remember and understand that Facebook means the realisation of an American dream and they are not going to wreck his business model just to satisfy those of us who are hit as much by the Indian government’s insistence on collecting and keeping data on all of us in its Aadhaar database as by the international sites reminding us every day that we are also exposed to the hazards of being a global citizen on the internet.
In his wonderfully evocative book Why I am a Hindu, Shashi Tharoor reproduces the ancient verse (Nasadiya Sukta or Creation Hymn) from the Rig Veda which after giving us great knowledge of the nothingness before the start of time leaves us at the end with the splendid riddle -
He, who surveys it all from the highest heaven. He knows — or maybe even He does not know. In some dystopian future, maybe there will be an all-seeing, all-knowing machine successor of the Internet that would get to know everything. The doubt whether even God would not know everything might be replaced by the certitude of a future of avatar of the all-pervasive, omniscient Internet knowing everything. Do we know whether human beings will be better off then than we are now while everyone is stealing our privacy to know who we are and what music or books we buy? Meanwhile, we Facebook and we Twitter and we Instagram and we Google away to our heart’s content. This is our utopia and we just have to hope that we are right.
(R. Mohan is the Resident Editor of the Chennai and Tamil Nadu editions of Deccan Chronicle)
