Thread by @nixxin

It's important for us in India to track what happened with Cambridge Analytica and Facebook for multiple reasons. Here's how I'm thinking about it.

If data is the new oil, then it just caught fire and is polluting democracies.

Firstly, we need to realise that making personal data public has severe consequences. Both for individuals as well as for democracies. Harvesting this data and using it is no longer complex.

We also need to realise that the amount of data that is already public, both with private parties and political entities is already enough to compromise us. The compromise might not happen from them directly

But will happen from their clients or their servers. Data once lost, will travel around the world so quickly, and be cloned, built on, manipulated and used and misused.

That goes back to the point that Bruce schneier makes about data being a toxic asset: the cost of losing that data is much much larger than the benefit of retaining it. If we ignore this, we're setting up for disaster.

We have a global market failure in data protection
Too much is being collected by too many. Users either dont have agency, or are being forced to trade data for services,not understanding consequences

Hence my call for data disarmament & for strict global laws on data protection

As we have seen, India doesn't have an information security culture and poor enforcement. Voter ID lists are public, personal info is uploaded by govt departments in PDFs, private entities (schools and colleges) do the same. Search around and India is leaking info like a firehose

And yes, the biggest national security risk is aadhaar, and @rsprasad denial of issues and @UIDAI incompetence, poor enforcement, and lack of monitoring, is already a national disaster. We are asking to be manipulated and compromised.

A committee, or tech security measures WILL NOT FIX THIS. We've jumped into a whirlpool head first, on the tune of the pied Piper of koramangala who doesn't seem to understand implications of the mess he has created,& is willing to compromise our country to try & save face.

We really need to pause &reconsider this conversation of personal data into a public asset & then it's privatisation, because that will rob both citizens & govt of control over future of our country. We are opening ourselves to a real threat.

I hope @adgpi is reading all this.

Added to this, is the role of mass marketing platforms, and the collection of granular data: demographic, psychographic & behavioral. The ability of systems to learn from this data, iterate for effectiveness, is no longer difficult.

Platforms need to be stopped from collecting individual personal data at such scale. You can say that this was possible before, but it was never this granular, this scale and this easy to use, and with the ability to improve.

Platforms need to reconsider their role in the world. Or countries need to force them to do this.

Right now we have countries trying to be companies and companies trying to be countries.

Both such moves rob citizens of rights: Companies trying to exert power over user behavior, and countries operating as if citizens who do not want their services, do not exist.