DATA GIANTS

After the despicable and diabolical events on January 6^th when outgoing President Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol, something unprecedented happened, probably something which has never been seen or heard before.  Twitter and Facebook blocked the incumbent President’s account from their platforms.

That organizations like Facebook and Twitter can block the account of the President of the United States shows how powerful these big tech companies are and how great the gatekeepers of American democracy are even though America’s democracy just survived and insurrection by an outgoing President. President Trump riled up an insurrection with his white supremacist approach and exhorted some of his supporters to barge into the US capitol but in the end, America’s democratic ethos which is so deeply ingrained in its wider populace won.

After all these egregious antics which befuddled the entire world for some nations, it was a schadenfreude. Trump incited his voters in his own inimical style with flagrant speeches and coerced them to lay siege of the US Capitol which deplorably even though expected met a gory end.

In the ensuing milieu which was fermented after Trump’s diabolical speeches and rancid tweets, five people lost their lives and hundreds were wounded but still it did not cut much ice with POTUS who seriously felt that he has been hard done by.

While the blame lay squarely with President Trump for this insurrection and riling up emotions but social media companies like Twitter and Facebook were also blamed for peddling and propagating lies, these companies quickly swung into action and immediately suspended the accounts of President Trump.

This alacrity also shows how big and powerful these companies are that we can take on the might of the incumbent President of the United States. It is not to suggest what Trump did was right or these firms were wrong in blocking Trump’s account but at the same time, it is time to reflect as to how these companies have become so big and mighty that they can block the most powerful man in the world from their platform without fearing any backlash from the Government.

Facebook has often been accused of hate speeches, rigging elections, and manipulating results with the kind of database that they have, Cambridge Analytica scam now withstanding. This also shows their penchant for lucre.

After the acquisition of WhatsApp Facebook has become even more powerful. There are over 400 million WhatsApp users in India and over a billion users worldwide and  this decision of WhatsApp to share information with Facebook companies it can spell some trouble in the countries wherein both these organizations operate. Even though at the time of acquisition it was said that WhatsApp will remain a separate entity however the ever-obsequious WhatsApp is extremely loyal to its parent company Facebook.

Facebook-owned messaging giant WhatsApp has announced a big change to its privacy policy which, once a user accepts its new T&Cs, will see it start to share some user data with its parent company — including for ad-targeting purposes on the latter service.

Facebook can offer better friend suggestions and show you more relevant ads if you have an account with them. For example, you might see an ad from a company from which you bought the recent product rather than an unknown company.

One such marketing use-case for Facebook to make use of the WhatsApp phone number data is for its Custom Audiences ad offering, whereby businesses using its platform can target ads based on an existing customer contact list they have.

National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), the body that operates the popular UPI payments infrastructure, said that it had granted approval to WhatsApp to roll out UPI-powered payments in the country.

Like Google, Samsung, and a number of other firms, WhatsApp has built its payments service atop UPI, a payments infrastructure built by a coalition of large banks in India. NPCI said WhatsApp, which has amassed over 400 million users in India, can expand payments to its users in a “graded manner,” and to start with, it can only roll out the payments service to 20 million users and has to work with multiple banking partners. (WhatsApp said today it is working with five leading banks in India: ICICI Bank, HDFC Bank, Axis Bank, the State Bank of India, and Jio Payments Bank.)

After allowing WhatsApp to roll out the digital payment and Facebook has also tied up with Reliance Jio in a $5.7 Billion deal it seems that entire data might go to big tech companies.

India must come out clearly with data security laws in line with those in Europe to save any data breach from these exploitative companies. India will be at a greater disadvantage if the entire market is dominated by one tech giant which is holding such a humungous amount of data.

We can take some lessons from our neighborhood China, on the way they dealt with these tech giants. Chinese have their own Social media sites like WeChat, Baidu, Tencent, etc. and they did not allow Facebook or Twitter any other US companies to gain a foothold into the Chinese markets. Even the big e-commerce firms like Amazon and Walmart were kept at bay by Alibaba and its ilk.

With the amount of data that these companies it is very much possible that they might not only sell it to advertisers but to someone who is willing to pay for it and once the data is made available to the buyer how it is used could be anybody’s guess. More allegations and manipulations is on cards.

America never encouraged monopolies whereas in our country we have many monopolies. We must not let these organizations become big bullies of Big Data or AI.

The government of India has to make it absolutely clear that all data servers which have Indian data must be located in India only and not in any foreign country, RBI has made it mandatory for all financial data to be stored in India and if WhatsApp is sharing all commercial data with Facebook it might lead to a breach of this policy. It is high time that India comes out with a law on Data security else it might just prove to be deleterious.

www.rbi.com

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Disclaimers : Views expressed are personal and not to malign or criticize any organization or Government.Based on information collected over internet and Newspapers