In ‘What Privacy Means’, Siddharth Sonkar explains how an Indian citizen’s privacy is hardly ‘private’.
W hen Judith Duportail, a freelance journalist, broke up with her boyfriend, she downloaded Tinder, the dating app. She began getting addicted to the app and in the course of using it, being a journalist, she became curious about how the app was helping her find matches. With the help of privacy activist Paul-Olivier Dehaye – the founder of Personal Data.IO, which aims to ensure data protection rights – she sent an email to Tinder asking it to show all the data it had on her.
How dating apps exploit India’s loosely formed definition of ‘personal information’
Soon, she was surprised when she received 800 pages of information – about her Facebook likes, links to her old Instagram pictures, ranking of the age group of men she was interested in, the number of friends she had on Facebook and where she had carried out each and every online conversation with her matches.
