Surveillance in India and The US

Think privacy is bad in China? Wait until you see what India is planning. 

The Indian government has secretly been working on a “comprehensive” social registry, that will track every aspect of every citizen’s life: “when a citizen moves between cities, changes jobs, buys new property, when a member of a family is born, dies or gets married and moves to their spouse’s home”. Five years in the planning, the system couldn’t go live today as it would run afoul of a 2018 supreme-court judgement that “reiterated individual privacy as a fundamental right”; but notes show the government is planning to remove privacy safeguards from the law. These sorts of privacy vs. surveillance political battles are going to become more and more frequent as surveillance and A.I. technology becomes cheaper and better.

And the U.S. is contemplating enhanced surveillance, too 

A number of U.S. government agencies are working with both startups and tech giants, including Google, Facebook, and Amazon, to assemble a number of technologies including cell-phone location monitoring and facial recognition in order to help track and slow the spread of COVID-19.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *