DailyPost 2579
DOES PRIVACY EXIST IN INDIA?
This very question can raise an alarm, or it can lead to you into thinking what is the legal situation? What does it mean in real life? Is privacy threatened in any manner in this country or worse still, does it exist all? We have been hearing of criminal defamation to compensate to some variant of personal / community-based vilification in public or of the much-touted data protection act, which took its own sweet time to become law. Is privacy the limited to and only consigned in the Digital Personal Data Protection Act? What transformative has happened with Right to Privacy being declared as fundamental right?
The only law which came into existence after the landmark right to privacy judgement has been Digital Personal Data Protection Act. There has been no other enactment regarding privacy whatsoever. It can also be safely presumed that the tone and tenor of right to privacy is in a manner that if digital privacy is taken care of, privacy issues would be sorted out once and for all. First digital privacy is not synonymous to privacy of an individual in is entirety, privacy for those who might have a different opinion; privacy has been an ageless issue. Attack on privacy has been one of the favorite pastimes of the detractors of modern civilized behavior.
The second issue is that data privacy is not digital privacy or you may even call it privacy in our current cyber ecosystem. How do we find out whether privacy is being enforced on social media platforms or for that matter by the electronic media? Whether privacy was not ripped apart in the media trial conducted in the Sushant Singh Rajput case? And what about the case of a woman MP recently in the same vein on the social media? Has that not been attack on privacy? If these instances have not been the epitome of attack on privacy, then what are all these?
Privacy in many ways remains undefined, as it hangs legally in mid-air. India does to have a standalone right to privacy act, dealing with all privacy related issues in totality. Privacy concerns human beings as nothing else and can rip apart once life and peace in entirety. It can be nerve wreaking to an extent that if would become difficult to pick the shreds of life and add it up as your own life. We have seen lives reaching the brink and at times, crossing over to the next world. Others keep suffering the ignominy endlessly. The approach to handling all these through legal defamation and /or digital privacy cannot take us anywhere. The present nature of social media and electronic can only make things even more toxic as exploiting privacy seems to have been weaponised.
TOTALITY OF PRIVACY CAN BE TREATED AS THE OPERATING FORMULA OF RIGHT TO PRIVACY.
Sanjay Sahay
Have a nice evening.