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An IIIT Delhi Research Group Looks At The Perception Of Privacy In India; Gets Interesting Results
The advent of the Internet as the go-to place for e-commerce, social networking, professional work etc. has resulted is people sharing a lot of personal information online willingly or unwittingly. As a rule, most of the savvy Internet users have a decent knowledge of the privacy issues on the Internet. Most of the people who have jumped onto the Internet since the increase in its accessibility are most probably taking the whole thing for granted. This explains the identity theft, privacy slip-ups and successful online scams. How does India fare in the scenario?
A group of researchers from IIIT Delhi with the delightfully cool name of PreCogs ( a term from the brilliant sci-fi flick Minority Report) have carried out a study to figure out how much Indian Internet users know about privacy as as concept. The first thing that the report says that since India is still a developing country, it has a slightly different notions of online privacy compared to other developed nations. New developments like UID, the privacy bill etc. make it essential for data on the privacy perceptions of Indian Internet users. Since the country doesn’t have proper privacy laws in place, it makes sense to map out these perceptions so that policy makers can understand the prevailing sentiment and keep that in mind before developing privacy laws and policies.
The study was divided into two phases. The first phase involved 20 interviews and 4 focus group discussions while the second phase involved a detailed questionnaire being responded to by 10,427 people across the country. .
Here are some of the results they encountered:
Most participant related the word ‘privacy’ with mobile phones, social media and the Internet than other kinds of privacy in the physical world. This is a little disturbing as awareness of privacy as a concept needs to be larger than just the Internet.
Those who were surveyed felt that the most protected ‘Personally Identifiable Information (PII)” were passwords and then financial details about banks and cards. Other forms of PII like mobile phone number, health related details and religions were not considered to be protected.
Participants were not aware of privacy in public places. An example being taking pictures of someone in a public place. An increasing amount of people are storing financial information on their phone due to improvements in mobile banking and payments. Some of the stored information was related to passwords, PAN numbers, PIN numbers etc. A majority of participants were satisfied by the protection provided by mobile phone operators and other service providers. Most of the surveyed participants made sure that they deleted sensitive information from their phones before discarding the device.
An interesting insight here is that people were more concerned about the privacy issue of someone taking their pictures/videos etc. rather than data and information collected from CCTV and other monitoring devices.
There was more awareness among participants about privacy policies of Internet services as compared to a similar study done in 2004. More of them tend to read these policies before signing up. 40% of the people would never share their personal information through emails or any other kind of online communication tool. That leaves 60% of the people who are not concerned with these details. A minority of those surveyed had absolutely no privacy concerns when sharing information on social networks. Pictures were some of the most privacy invasive things on the Internet and social networks according to those surveyed. 5% of the people tend to accept friend requests from strangers if there are mutual friends between them. This is the same with most social networks and third party applications.
80% of those surveyed were aware of identity theft using credit cards. Many people are aware of financial privacy because of the various scams and online frauds that have taken place. Another important point put forth by the study is that most people mistakenly believe that there is a privacy law/regulation in India, when it is clearly absent. This is a dangerous misconception and should be noted by policy makers. India needs a comprehensive privacy law soon. Currently, there is no clarity on what constitutes privacy violation. This should be addressed by policy making section of the Government soon.
Privacy(in all aspects) will be a number one challenge as India grows in the next 5-10 years. The rise in the usage of Internet is a big factor. Privacy as a concept should be integrated in educational models as well as public communication. Without a privacy law in place, the situation is bound to go out of control in the future.
What are your thoughts on Internet privacy? Share them with us in the comments.
Full Study | Privacy in India: Attitudes and Awareness V 2.0
Image Source | Kqed
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2012-12-10 04:01:15
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