The question who produces data is not important. What is important is who controls and uses data . India is not insulated from these questions. Our Government links data to national security and takes up data safety as its job. But this is state-centric view of data sovereignty. There are alternate views of data sovereignty that comes from below as against this top-down view. Statist data sovereignty lay within the trap of data colonization. Hence, some say that Indian state exercises its sovereignty by controlling data in neo-colonial ways. We can also trace a complex relations of Indian nation state and the global tech giants. In 2020, we find that about 200 Chinese apps were banned after a conflict over the border. At the same time relations with Meta went from friendly embrace to co-option . We can find several internet shutdowns in sensitive places and take down orders to microblogging site X. We may see an alignment of the muscular majoritarianism with claims of data sovereignty as it was almost always tied to national security. We might trace that the equation of Indian state with global tech giants oscillates in a continuum of cooperation, co-option, confrontation to coercion.
Data activists in India take people-centric view of data sovereignty. They link data sovereignty to people’s agency and their ability to control what happens to their personal data. The large scale collection of data for biometric identification and its subsequent use by multiple private players is thought to be loss of agency by digital activists. To the state data is a national resource and is linked to national sovereignty while the digital activists stress that data is a personal resource of the producer and is linked to sovereigness of every citizen. Although , India has a Digital Personal Data (DPDP2023) protection act, the activists hold that ordinary citizens have no say in the use of their personal data. It seems that the state says India has a right over data, its people and its organizations. Thus, the sovereign Indian nation state is the ultimate arbiter of the data of its citizens and organisation. This may conflict with atmanirbhar Bharat which cannot lead a self-reliant India without self-reliant citizens. This indicates that private data no longer belongs to the people. This makes data-subject vulnerable to what can be described a banopticon where by an individual can be exiled in his or own place without being able to access his/her financial account, health benefits or travel services etc. Since the Government has access to his intimate data and can therefore ban him/her in principle. Hence, data colonialism is not just practiced by Big Tech but also by our very own Governments .
Over the years we find that digital activists in India have been advocating data sovereignty by including the fact that the people ought to have knowledge of how their data is being used. This data knowledge puts limits on the state use of the same data. The sate collects data in various ways. Even an application to seek driving licence becomes a data collection portal. This concept of data knowledge prioritizes the agency of the producers of data and advocates their right over how their data is being used. The consent of the subjects of data cannot be presumed continuously or perpetuity. Some say that often face recognition technology (FRT) of AI is being used to arrest innocent people using previous digital data. Unfortunately, such practices can aid police violence and discrimination of the minorities. In the contest of abuse of private data by the state, right to data knowledge becomes necessary. We need this citizen control over data to let dissent be part of our democracy. This is profoundly important because that the state can use data to silence dissent. People themselves will be afraid to articulate dissent and thus democracy would be crippled where dissent is killed. This is why data activists say that taking control over the data of people does not come from the position of strength but from the position of weakness and anxiety over loss of control over the citizens. Data sovereignty becomes, therefore, the site where anxieties over control and authority are staged.
Indian grassroot movements for data democracy from below led to the enactment of the right to information act in 2005. This means movement for data transparency and accountability from below is not new to our country. We have some initiatives like DataKind Benguluru and LibTech ( Stanford University ) that initiated the struggle to establish infrastructures of accountability by engaging with open government data( OGD). These initiatives of the citizens attempt to make data legible to people (transparent) and enable them to seek accountability of the Government and seek justice if need be. We need such grassroot watchdogs to protect the abuse of data of the citizens. Thus, from bottom-up, we are not just led to data knowledge but also to data justice. We need more OGDs and access to them.
Grassroot data collectives monitoring OGDs will not only let citizen regulate the use of their personal data but also bring about active participatory democracy. It can assist marginalized groups to expose their persecution that may use data driven technologies. It may be a great weapon to prevent the abuse of genealogy technologies like finger prints or biometrics that might be used to profile caste, tribal, or any other discriminatory status. This local vigilant collectives might enable us to fight vote chori that has taken our country by storm these days. Fake or ghost/ duplicate IDs, and voting cards maybe discovered and destroyed. Thus, there is a possibility of checking and eliminating the practices of fraud and corruption from below. We do need data security. This data security includes its abuse. It seems that we can detect abuse only from below. We need vigilant citizen’s collectives to protect the data of innocent citizens being abused by those in power. Data agency, transparency, accountability, data knowledge and data justice has to be accepted as the constituting part of data sovereignty. National security is certainly important. But data is produced by the data subject and hence , is owned by him and her. The ethics of data usage appears to be the need of the hour to protect both the nation as well as the data producing citizen.
