NewDelhi:Facebook has been in the news in India for all the wrong reasons recently. A criminal case has been registered in Raipur against a top Facebook executive, Ankhi Das, for overlooking inflammatory posts by a politician, allegedly because removing it would anger the ruling dispensation.
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Congress have been engaged in a war of words on this issue and it is likely to spill over into the next session of Parliament. There have also been allegations about the Arogya Setu app not being fully secure, but information technology minister Ravi Shankar Prasad has assured people that it is safe.
Let us recall what happened with Cambridge Analytica. The company was alleged to have systematically influenced the 2016 United States (US) presidential election. There were claims that the company illegally monitored the accounts of around 85 million Facebook users.
By doing this, it was able to discern what many Americans were thinking, what kind of leadership they were seeking and what policies appealed to them. These allegations were not fully substantiated, but it affected the company adversely. Facebook also had to pay a huge price for its actions, its shares nosedived by $119 billion in just one day.
Private information barriers being breached is becoming a real danger. Due to the spread of Covid-19, different smartphone apps have become almost mandatory in almost every country. The data collected through these apps, if used for anything other than medical and scientific purposes, could seriously compromise the privacy of the individual.
Until now, people were monitored through their physical movements and views expressed on social media. Now, for the first time, it would seem that your medical parameters could reach unknown corporates. They could ascertain who is a diabetic, hypertensive or what allergies a person could have. This can be abused, especially in places with a weak democracy or one without a robust and independent judiciary.
This debate actually began in the mid-1990s and was initiated by Gabriel Baiman, a researcher at the University of Haifa, Israel. After extensive research, he found that 90% of the recruitment to terrorist organisations was done through social platforms.
After a thorough reading of what topics people read, which videos they had seen, how they expressed their thoughts, what sort of messages they exchanged with loved ones and others, researchers were able to get an accurate picture of what was going on in the minds of young people.
Comments are closed.