Is it time that India got serious about privacy? Following a supreme Court intervention,tha goverment is setting up a panel to come up with a bill on data protection.Data leaks (real and perceived),however,are not the only privacy issue affecting Indian citizens

Most of your personal data is already out in the public domain thanks to your bank, your mobile service provider, your cable wallah, and sometimes even your dentist. And that’s when we haven’t started the conversation on the intrusive apps that you download on your phone or tablet, just to get through your workday a little more efficiently.

Does India really need the westernised model of cross selling at the cost of all your personal info being public? Even if India were to get a privacy law, how well would it work in the current environment? There is so little clarity and hardly any definition or understanding of personal privacy.

Even as a Supreme Court final ruling is awaited, and the government is setting up committee after committee to determine what will be its final stance on the subject, even the mention of privacy brings forth a whole load of varying opinions from people from all walks of life.

For a lot of people, it is as simple as not wanting to be disturbed by a telemarketer in the middle of their afternoon siesta, while for others it is fear that their homes or children may be at threat if unscrupulous people know their daily schedules. As always, there are also those who will say, “I have nothing to hide so how does it matter if my information is public.”

The arguments for and against each aspect of privacy are complex, and the divergent views don’t make it any easier to arrive at a clearly defined “This is right, that, is wrong” answer.

The ‘National Do Not Call’ registry that started in India on 1 September 2007 for instance, was one of the first steps towards an unofficial recognition of the need for a privacy law in India.

All you needed to do was register, and the onus was on telemarketers to ‘scrub’ (compare tele-calling lists against the registry’s list and weed out those who had opted to be not disturbed).

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India had provided clauses to impose fines on telemarketers who called people on the Do Not Disturb list and mandated landline and mobile service providers to disconnect numbers of telemarketers where more than one complaint was received.

It worked. For a while. Then the hardhit Indian telemarketing industry began pressurising the government: millions of tele-callers across India would lose their jobs if the cold calling companies went out of work. It was, after all the only sector where anyone over 18 years of age could get a job, with or without a degree, add to which, the ability to speak English was not a mandatory requirement.

“Our initial approach was that telecallers could only approach people who had actively signed up to receive marketing and advertising offers but the industry protest could not be entirely ignored… not with the depressed economy that prevailed in the mid-2000s. So we had agreed to a ‘scrub list’ approach. Now everything is almost back to square one,” rues a senior government official who was with the TRAI at the time.

He contends that the pressure from the telemarketing industry combined with pressure from operators (fixed line and mobile service who make their money on the bulk calls) resulted in the government looking the other way on slack enforcement. He contends that the pressure from the telemarketing industry combined with pressure from operators (fixed line and mobile service who make their money on the bulk calls) resulted in the government looking the other way on slack enforcement.

The only difference is, “now telemarketers appear to have a firm - albeit unofficial - DND list… last time the furore and support for the NDNC Registry had magnified because ministers and Supreme Court judges were getting calls during work from people offering loans or so on. Now VVIPs don’t seem to be getting such calls,” the official said. As a result, 900000000-odd (900 million) wireless subscribers are a sitting duck for anyone with anything to sell.

The current approaches to the privacy debate are focussed more, on the current Aadhaar controversy and the potential for leaks of the personal data accessible through the UIDAI number

Other aspects, however, don’t seem to have even entered the debate yet. For instance, cross selling of products by banks that narrow in on specific customers based on their bank balances and spending patterns.

“My bank knows my balance because I have an account with it. I wouldn’t want to share that with random insurance agents, or loan finance companies. My personal finance details are exactly that – mine and personal,” says restaurateur Meenakshi Datt.

“Now that banks have gotten into these side-businesses (insurance, share portfolio management and God-alone-knows what else), everything is in-house, at least on paper. So that’s how I get bombarded with calls offering loans,” Datt said.

She has a second account where I maintain just the minimum balance, and use my other mobile number. I have never ever gotten a sales call for that account,” she says, asserting, “to me the sales calls I get for my primary account, that is unauthorised use of my financial data”.

A branch manager with a public sector branch says “not only is it a matter of cross-selling, we are as an economy consciously encouraging debt. Youngsters are being encouraged to take loans for what really should be viewed as non-essential purchases. They are encouraged to spend using credit cards. We are slowly but certainly moving towards a Western model where everyone is always in debt. I am not a right-winger but I believe this will eventually spell disaster.”

A counsellor who helps people work out payment schedules to get out of debt, Arshit Choudhary, says “with the constant exchange of all financial details about all customers, there’s no dearth of computerised programmes that can map out for a potential seller, exactly what appliances you have in your kitchen, how much money you have at your disposal and even based on your previous spending patterns, exactly what you’ll buy this Diwali.”

But with a pending Supreme Court ruling and the government of the day yet to make up its mind on what constitutes privacy exactly, for now, all we can do, is watch and wait.