“Tech companies should not be the ones setting the rules for the society & the govt”

In our attempt to safeguard our privacy and freedom of speech are we missing the big picture? Is right to privacy above national interest? Charu Raizada raises these pertinent questions in conversation with Pranjal Sharma, in this episode of Mrigashira.

Pranjal Sharma is an economic analyst, advisor and author of ‘India Automated’. He leads public discourse at global and national platforms, including World Economic Forum; guides projects on economic forecasting, business intelligence and public diplomacy to interpret policy impact on industry and society.

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Should multinational private companies be allowed to question the rules of operations laid down? Would you classify Facebook, Twitter and the like as a media company or as IT company?

Every company in a free open democratic society, every organisation entity and individual has right to question the government about any law and policy that is being done or implemented in an open manner.

Let’s talk about the rules and regulations which concern technology companies. There is a three-way relationship between companies, civil societies, or the consumers and the government. Now, in this contract between these three stakeholders of our society, you need to have a rules framework on how to ensure that things work in a way that everybody benefits. And it is not to the detriment of any of the parties involved. So, with that background, I think it’s important that in the era of the fourth industrial revolution, where technology and such linkages play such a critical role in our lives, we need to reorganise, renew and rethink the laws and the rules that govern our relationship with them earlier. If you remember, when Google came up, it was the underdog, it was taking on the Microsofts of the world. And we all supported it. But now Google is the Microsoft of the world and it is basically deciding everything for everybody – from e-commerce and the app ecosystem, to what kind of content is promoted or established. And this is the same thing which applies to other companies, which are part of the big five or six as you may include them from Twitter to Facebook, which now actually own several other services. And you know, the size allows them to buy more companies and start-ups as they happen.

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So, WhatsApp, Instagram are very important examples of how Facebook has expanded its empire. Twitter is a standalone in many ways. But still, it has from being a global square of conversations, turned into something which a lot of people have concerns about.

On the one hand, our constitution talks about freedom of speech. On the other hand, the government is asking for traceability and transparency, is that justified?

Traceability is a very important question. But let’s first look at the relationship between tech companies and users. All of us have agreed to the terms and conditions of the technology service providers and devices and apps that we use. How many of us are able to understand them, which is sometimes you know, 500 words, sometimes 2,000 words? Fundamentally, it’s a one-sided bag, either we use it or we exit, there is no question and there is no opportunity for us to negotiate that set of conditions that we take when we are downloading an app. If WhatsApp decides these are the rules, you have to accept it, there is no accountability, you cannot question as a user, all of us can question every other product and service that we consume from other companies. If you are buying an automobile, you know those companies have an accountability.

Today, these tech giants have grown to a level where their user community is bigger than any other country in the world. So therefore, they have said that we will set the rules and governments and nations and people and users have to follow it. Now many countries which are small, do not have the power and have not been able to question them. But the European Commission has put very strict rules. The United States Congress and Senate is questioning them too. So, I think India has every right as a sovereign country to reorient its laws to ensure and define what freedom of expression is.

If we again look at how, in a democratic country, freedom of speech is enshrined in our Constitution, we have a right to living the way we want to live and expressing our views. However, those have been established through a system and an ecosystem of checks and balances between state governments, we have political leaders, we have a ruling party, we have opposition parties, we have state level institutions, we have the judiciary, we have a non-government organisation. So, if somebody tries to curb our freedom of expression, so many different bodies can come and counter it. In the case of private companies, if they set the rules, they do not want any national law to be controlling them at the fundamental level, this is what is creating the current friction between the Government of India or our country and these tech giants.

Does seeking information from platforms like WhatsApp, which are end to end encrypted, go against individual liberty? Is right to privacy above national interests?

Freedom of expression and privacy needs a balance as well. You cannot have absolute sense of privacy in an open democratic society. Absolute freedom of expression is also not allowed. You cannot stand on your own rooftop and scream and abuse your neighbour, that is not freedom of expression. Freedom of expression means that you have to respect your neighborhood, you have to respect other citizens in the society. And the very fact that you have to respect fellow citizens means that there are certain limits and curbs on you.

Second point is, what is the cost of absolute privacy? I’m not saying we should not have privacy. But the question is, what type of privacy? Are we willing to forego our sense of security in favour of absolute privacy? I think that’s a dialogue that the society should have. A society has to take a call at decision and choose what it accepts as privacy and what it does not accept, and when is it willing to offer and give up its privacy.

India has had a strong legacy of looking at these issues from the time that telecommunications entered India, to the time of the launch of the mobile services, to now in the times of Internet communication. When mobile phones began, you remember, anybody could buy a SIM card, and anybody could get a connection. If you remember when we all had landlines, there used to be a phone directory which had everybody’s names, addresses and phone numbers. If you asked for the same in the era of mobile phones, people will say it is invasion of privacy. The whole concept of spam mails and spam messaging, etc., has ensured that we don’t allow our personal, mobile communication details to be made public. But there was an era before the Internet and mobiles when we had actually allowed the government or any service provider to make our details absolutely public. And there was no question and there was no worry about it.

When the telecom revolution with mobiles began, the government started saying, well, for the sake of security, we’d like to know who this person is because if you are not making the public information public through a directory, then how do I know who is using what number? All the mobile companies protested and, trust me, all of us will agree, it has made our lives better. Hundreds and thousands of crimes have been solved.

All that the government is saying today are two things. One, let us know who created the message. And I think the government has a right to question that. The second thing that the government is saying is, you should appoint officers for grievance redressal. People who are employees of the company and who can engage with the civil society, with the consumers and with the government. Remember the triangle, I talk to you about the relationship between technology companies, government, as well as consumer bodies. Some of these companies like WhatsApp and others, and Twitter, even as we speak, are still struggling to appoint the kind of officers who were employees of the company to be responsible for some of these issues. So, there might be a fake case against any of these companies, or they could be a genuine case, but either ways, the company should have a mechanism to be able to deal with that.

Internationally we have bodies like the Internet Watch Foundation funded by the global tech industry to verify content. Do we have anything like this in India?

I think we need bodies which can speak for the consumer and the civil society. Unfortunately, what has happened is that many of the non-government organisations that we see speaking for the civil society are actually funded by the large companies. A lot of that funding is opaque through more than arm’s length distance. So, in the end, you will see that they tend to represent consumers, but they are actually representing the tech companies. And they always push that point of view in the garb of consumer interest.

I think we need such bodies. We need people who are completely agnostic of such influences to come together and create it. I’m not aware of too many of such bodies; there may be some, but perhaps they do not have the kind of influence or the profile. But I am sure that with time we will get it.

What gives me strength is the fact that if you look at the food industry, it’s a similar parallel comparison. The laws about what is good to eat, which calories are good, whether too much sugar is good or bad and whether a food item should be allowed to be sold in the open market, is not decided by the food companies, it is decided by the food regulators of every country. The society and the government come together to say that we think these are the rules about what is good food what is bad food; give the right information and let the consumer decide. Which is exactly what we need as far as the technology companies are concerned as well – that the government should set the rules, inform people that this is what is happening, this is what is good, and therefore, ensure that technology companies are not the ones setting the rules for the other two stakeholders, which is the society and the government.

*Edited for length and clarity

(Mirgashira is a podcast for Indian PR and Communication professionals anchored by RadhaRadhakrishnan and Charu Raizada. To listen to all episodes visit https://www.mrigashirapodcast.com/)