Description
- Rights: Indian Subcontinent, January 2022
- Print ISBN: 9789391028879
- Ebook ISBN: 9789391028954
- Category: Non-fiction/ Politics and Current Affairs
- Binding: Hardback
- Imprint: Hachette India
- Page Extent: 288 pp
- Cover Price: Rs 599.00
SELLING POINTS
- A timely, remarkable book that comprehensively addresses the debate of individual privacy in India.
- Tackles the most pertinent questions on our right to privacy: Am I always being tracked? Do all the apps on phone have access to all my data? Does sharing my information really help? And what is the future of privacy in India?
- Addresses the latest developments on privacy, taking into account the most recent PDP Bill presented in the Indian Parliament in 2021.
- Highlights the problems with the existing framework on privacy in India and provides potential solutions.
- Insightfully explores the inroads made into the privacy of Indian citizens by devices and institutions whose workings most people do not comprehend.
- The author is a lawyer and has extensively worked on the issues of privacy, and has been involved in discussions on the scope of the PDP Bill with the Joint Parliamentary Committee in 2019.
- A must-read for every Indian citizen curious about their rights, particularly in the ‘new normal’ of the pandemic.
ABOUT THE BOOK
In India, where boundaries between the personal and public are increasingly becoming blurred, can relationships of trust be rebuilt?
In 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic triggered governments across the world to instate lockdowns, digital contact tracing and the use of drones to monitor and map residents and potential virus carriers through facial and gait recognition became par for the course. Although this paved the way for social control through surveillance becoming the ‘new normal’, rampant news about information leaks and breaches by apps, spy softwares, and social media platforms have awakened individuals to how their privacy is in the process of being invaded, constantly and insidiously.
In India, a citizen’s privacy is hardly ‘private’ as it is enmeshed with businesses, corporations and the government. With inadequate and outmoded laws, and disparate institutions normalizing privacy violations of personal information in the name of national security, apprehensions about individual data and what is actually happening with it have hit a peak.
In What Privacy Means, Siddharth Sonkar analyses the history and understanding – both cultural and political – of privacy in India and establishes why objecting to interference with privacy is a pressing need today. Taking a deep dive into the grating realities of individual privacy, Sonkar explores the concept through constitutional duties to ‘respect, protect and fulfil’ it for citizens of India, and provides a roadmap for everyone who is unsure of the rights they are entitled to as they live online.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Siddharth Sonkar is a technology, media and telecommunications (TMT) lawyer based out of Bangalore, with a specific interest in informational privacy. In his final year at law school, Siddharth led a group of students as coordinator of a student committee supervised by a faculty advisor, to submit comments to the Joint Parliamentary Committee on the Personal Data Protection Bill, 2019. The committee, on the basis of the comments, invited NUJS (National University of Juridical Sciences) to appear in-person to discuss the suggested changes, making NUJS one of the only academic institutions to be invited for an in-person appearance before the Committee to discuss changes to the proposed data protection law. When he is not writing, Siddharth spends his time listening to music, playing with stray dogs and his guitars.
