Protecting Individuals Privacy - Case Study Example

The National Intelligence Grid (Natgrid) aims to monitor the activities of private citizens1, a move that presses on the boundaries of a citizen’s fundamental liberties. It’s an echo of Big Brother in the guise of public interest; the concept is noble, but there’s so much opportunity for abuse that it cancels all intended benefits. The Natgrid will surely speed up the functions of the bureaucracy with a centralized intelligence system, but it’ll also make data accessible to a lot of unscrupulous personalities and agencies.

Although a data protection law already exists (The Information Technology Act), it only goes so far as to cover an individual’s activity. The individual is set apart from the act. The UPA has to set specific ground rules to ensure both aspects coexist but remain separate. The freedom to information shouldn’t be absolute; there has to be a limit to how much the government can access. The law should protect the individual first and foremost. Everything else follows accordingly.
“Convenient and personal are the flip-side to private and anonymous” according to Greenfield. Indeed, convenience comes at a steep price nowadays, and the technological juggernauts of the Information Age admit it. P3P is an essential component of the Web-browsing experience; it allows users to navigate the byways of the Internet without leaving crumbs for the hounds to sniff and follow. This provides a perfect analogy to the online cookies implanted in your browser’s cache; they’re there to monitor online activities, but the exact coverage of this policy is never fully described. As a measure of courtesy, some sites do live up to their word by restricting their own access to user data.

The opportunities exposed by a database of unlimited information are too tempting to resist, though, especially when everything of value is now stored in a remote corner or crevice on the web. The competition for technological supremacy between Google, Microsoft, and everyone else is beside the point. Someone will suffer from the fallout. The infringement on personal privacy is a mere convenience to the technocrats, but it should never be an option to the lowly user. Microsoft Internet Explorer’s noble attempt to make P3P the industry standard is slowly dying a natural death, with people voluntarily providing and publishing personal information through Facebook, YouTube, Tumbler, and a plethora of other social networking and media sites.

Hacking has existed ever since computers became online. It’s still the running trend nowadays, except that it’s institutionalized and accepted as a necessary evil. We have no other choice but to accept the system.