Private limited

As the clamour for CCTV surveillance rises with every bomb blast and terror strike, it is not incorrect to say that privacy is becoming an increasingly elusive and complicated issue in our modern lives.

The dictionary describes privacy as ‘the state or condition of being free from being observed or disturbed by other people’ and ‘the state of being free from public attention .’

The first concerns about the onslaught of privacy arose with the invention of the printing press when people found that information could be shared with millions (“shouted from the rooftops” as one commentator described it) . The onset and popularity of photography compounded those concerns.

Today privacy is under attack from all directions. Social media has made our notions of privacy a complicated issue. The amount of information we share about ourselves on these sites is staggering: from pictures of our pets to lovers to our daily mutterings to our political views, we revel in disclosure almost as if the act of sharing unburdens us.

More perturbing is the fact that technology has made it possible to store data forever. Today’s indiscretion has the potential to haunt not only you in your own lifetime but your legacy forever. But more insidious than social media — which in most cases deals with individuals voluntarily disclosing information about themselves — are the footprints we leave as we go about our virtual lives. What we research, buy, subscribe to, often unconsciously on the net reveals frightening amounts of information about ourselves which can be used in ways that we have not even begun to fathom. Such information can be bought, sold and employed for commercial or mala fide intent.

But that is only the tip of the iceberg. Every day technology conspires to rob us of even the last shreds of our privacy . We live in an age of stings, bugs phone taps, phone-hacking, and Wikileaks. Reality TV heralded by shows like Big Brother and its Indian variant Bigg Boss have taken the notion of privacy and stood it on its head. Millions of people now have the option of watching people’s lives unfold 24x7, and in high-definition surround-sound.

Ironically, for journalists, writers, artists poets and musicians, often what lies at the heart of creativity is the need to share, connect and be understood by a wider public. This too re-jigs traditional notions of privacy. Van Gogh’s love life, Freda Kahlo’s pain, Virgina Woolf’s struggle with sanity are all part of the great canon that informs and edifies the world of art and ideas. But what price privacy?

Of course, privacy is a cultural thing. As Indians we have a completely different notion of what information is OK to put out in the public domain than say the British. We think nothing of subjecting complete strangers to forensic scrutiny as we encounter them on trains and planes and in our daily lives. The invasion of other people’s space is almost an alien notion in Indian societies, and often we are not sensitised to it.

Perhaps the time has come when we ought to go about our daily lives with the belief that no conversation, no act, no moment is completely secure or private any more and every thing we do is completely public and accessible to every one. Perhaps that is what integrity truly means. Being completely consistent in our private and public persona.

Gandhi’s experiments with truth are a lesson for us all.

Malavika Sangghvi is a Mumbai-based writer
malavikasangghvi@hotmail.com