While data privacy has been a major concern around the world over the last few months, the data privacy debate in India has constantly been overlooked by the media, who tend to focus on more ‘sensational’ stories. The debate is neither given much importance in mainstream media, nor does it pique the interest of users on social media platforms. Perhaps there’s a major reason behind it. Does the average Indian citizen really care about data privacy at all?
According to data collected by the survey titled “Data Privacy and the Average Indian Netizen”, only 0.4% of the total respondents have no presence on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
The respondents predominantly use the services for personal use, with just 4.9% of the total respondents using the services for work, where they are likely to adopt better data sharing practices. We can infer that a majority of the respondents share personal information on these platforms, and as we will see a majority of this group is also quite happy to share data with apps as well.
Facebook has been in the headlines of late due to its involvement in the Cambridge Analytica case which compromised the personal information of over 50 million users. The massive outcry following the revelations led to the #DeleteFacebook campaign which was trending on social media just a few weeks ago. According to the data gathered by the survey, 81.9% of the respondents had heard about #DeleteFacebook, while the remaining had absolutely no clue. This tells us that a majority of our respondents are well aware of the circumstances surrounding Facebook today.
Despite this, very few actually deleted their Facebook profiles or accounts.
Some even defended Facebook by saying that the company did nothing wrong and only Cambridge Analytica should be held accountable for the data leak. A few respondents even showed some confidence in Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg, and said that they didn’t feel the need to delete their accounts as Zuckerberg had promised that there won’t be any such issues in the future.
In order to find out if the respondents were aware of the information being shared with the platforms, we asked them about data sharing permissions. We weren’t very surprised to find out that 43.9% of the respondents have given the apps access to all permissions. This is another reason why we believe the Facebook and Cambridge Analytica scandal has had little effect on how Indians use the social network.
While 63.6% of respondents were aware of the whole Cambridge Analytica controversy, a clear majority of users had not been affected by the issue at least in the way they used social media. When asked if the controversy had changed the way they used Facebook 37.6% of the respondents said ‘no’ and just 26.5% said ‘yes’, the rest weren’t sure if it had any effect and chose ‘maybe’. This provides some evidence that people don’t really think about data privacy enough to change the way they interact with social media platforms.
It’s clear to us that people are either not aware of the significance of their data and activity on social media, or have afforded these platforms too much trust. While controversies such as the current one may generate temporary interest and erode some of that trust from some people’s minds, a clear majority isn’t interested in changing anything at the moment to protect their privacy online.
