Harvesting digital produce

SC's judgment could make you own your personal avatars as you do in Second Life virtual world

People should control their own data. Full stop. In the current system, we don’t have control over our own data or the correlations emerging from the data that might be of value to us. Google and Facebook invisibly vacuum it up and then make money with it. Against this backdrop, the Supreme Court judgment upholding the right to privacy as an inherent fundamental right comes at a crucial time when digital industrialism has turned human data into a new commodity. And unlike other commodities that sell on the market for a price, our digital produce is harvested for free. 

Those who market or analyse our digital produce — our data — make money, shutting us out for good. This way, all the value we create — directly, through our writing, music, and other online contributions, or indirectly, through the data trail we leave behind us — never gets monetised by us. But now, in view of the Supreme Court order, there seems hope that the Virtual You could, in fact, be owned by you — by your personal avatar (your digital body) — so you could monetise your data stream and reveal only what you need to, when asserting a particular right. Armed with the Supreme Court’s judgment, you could own your personal avatars as you do in the Second Life virtual world, but with real-world implications. 

So imagine a new era of the internet where your personal avatar manages and protects your data, releasing only the required detail or amount for each situation and at the same time sucking clean your data crumbs as you navigate the digital world. This may sound like the stuff of science fiction films like The Matrix or Avatar: your virtual avatar including information such as a government-issued ID, medical information, financial accounts, degrees, birth certificate, various other credentials, and information so personal you don’t want to reveal it but do want to monetise its value, such as medical condition, for a poll or a research study. You could give out these data for specific purposes to specific entities for specific periods of time, sending a subset to your doctor and a different subset to the mutual fund that you would like to invest in. Thus, your avatar could transact with others without disclosing its owner’s identity, just like in Second Life. 

In Real Life, by contrast, your reputation is local, determined by what your local shopkeeper, your local employer, your friends, and what everyone else think of you. But in a digital economy shaped by court judgments that tilt the balance in favour of the ordinary people, the reputations of various personas in your avatar would turn portable. People with a digital wallet and avatar in Tamil Nadu could establish the reputation required to, say, borrow money to start a business in Assam. 

In fact, in his book, Who Owns the Future?, programmer Jaron Lanier thinks we can all start participating in the data game. Instead of freely providing social media sites and apps with data, which they, in turn, sell to analysts, we should demand a cut in their revenue for harvesting our digital produce. Unfortunately, most people and most newspapers are still concerned about surveillance on the actual, specific things they are doing. But that should be the least of their worries. It’s the data around your data that matters: what time you make a phone call, its duration, the location from which you initiated it, the places you went to while you talked, and so on. It has nothing to do with the content of your phone call or what you actually say in the phone call about politics or religion. This data around your data is then compared with data around other people’s data to reveal, say, your potential as a buyer (let’s stick to the buyer part for now). The advertiser can then limit his ad spend to the browsers of his target customers, instead of casting a wide net on all. This exploitation of our data is what we should be concerned about. Hopefully, protecting, withholding, or even selling data would soon turn possible, now that the Supreme Court has accorded privacy to individuals as a fundamental right. 

ashish.sharma@bsmail.in