Last week, the Indian Supreme Court ruled privacy was a fundamental human right protected by its constitution. This ruling was a response to the backlash against Aadhaar, a government-mandated biometric identification program.
While this does not affect the United States, in particular, it bothers me victories like this are not met with widespread praise.
Aadhaar was a program based on retinal scans and fingerprints.
Governments having access to basic information like this for every citizen is dangerous. In an age where being “off the radar” is becoming more and more impossible, Aadhaar is the next step to the total sacrifice of privacy.
This recent ruling by the Indian government should set the bar for countries across the world. Establishing privacy as something fundamentally protected is the only way to ensure it will not be trivialized in the face of further technological advancements.
Within most developed countries, basic physical privacy is generally protected. The government cannot simply barge into your home without a probable cause, and you are not obligated to share sensitive information with anyone in most circumstances.
However, the age of the internet has made it simple child’s play for governments and private companies to learn personal information about individuals. Social media sites and search engines like Google can track what you say, what you search and what you do. This has made having a digital fingerprint almost impossible to avoid.
While most do not live in a country where the government or corporations act as a “Big Brother” to its citizens, the fact digital identities can be so easily constructed means its prevention should be made a top priority.
Al Jazeera, an online international news hub, states, “Activists say Aadhaar links enough data to create a comprehensive profile of a person’s spending habits, their friends and acquaintances, the property they own, and a trove of other information.”
The very idea of this happening should be terrifying to people.
Our own country is one that should be analyzed on how it handles privacy. We are just as prone to having our data collected by companies. Government agencies, like the NSA, are proven to have access to practically anyone’s information.
We may have court precedents for specific privacy issues but no comprehensive protection of privacy as a whole.
The U.S. in particular should follow the lead of India or at least institute a set of guidelines like the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, which Fortune said protects personal control over data and complaints against misuse of this data.
Of course, this is about much more than just the U.S. This is an issue I suspect to become a major topic of discussion in most of the world within a decade or so.
We should all be able to remain certain our computer cameras are not being hacked to counter terrorists, and we should be able to rest easy when allowing a company to know who we are.
If those do not sound like they should be fundamental rights, I do not know what does.
Regardless of whether or not intentions are pure when collecting information, rulings like the one made by the Indian Supreme Court should spark an international trend. If it does, the world may delay a privacy-free future which has the potential to go terribly wrong.