My question to every self respecting, unbiased and competent judge, “why haven’t suo moto proceedings been initiated for criminal breach of trust against all the BigTech.”
BigTech makes a mickey out of every single Indian who uses their services or products. Data is blatantly sold. Privacy is intruded with the objective of selling what they find. The highest court has made observations but not passed strictures. Are we truly an independent and autonomous country. Or are we a colony of some un named and un stated coloniser who controls us.
As a country, are we so weak, so impotent and so ignorant that we don’t understand what is being done. Can’t we see the progress of China because of their strong and timely step of disallowing bigtech consumer services.
Whether we see Venezuela or Iran – it is not about armament but about data theft. Tomorrow it can happen to us. As we go into the ai age – the implications and repercussions get far worse than before.
Once there is algorithmic profiling – we cease to be human- and instead get reduced to a data point. Whose location, financials, conversations, communications, phone books, email content, messaging content, photos, health data and even family member data is all data that is not just for sale (which it is) but also used for training ai.
BigTech comes from one country. And thus has inherent bias. Not just geographical but also racial.
Handcuffing big tech and ensuring there is no international and continuing criminal breach of trust is not just desirable but a national security need.
It is all very simple to fix. Apple for example has put OpenAI in its place (who in turn has become an arm of the U.S. military now) – they use OpenAI as a back end vendor. It reduces them to being a supplier of technology.
We can do the same as well. All foreign consumer apps should be accessible only via a Bharat Super App. At one stage it looked like the Tatas would do that for our country. But they seem to have sufficient issues in managing their own house. Which makes them unfit to do anything of significance.
The best playbook is the NPCI playbook. Bharat Gen is the equivalent non-profit. There are others who will step in if the govt doesn’t want to. We just need to make sure that someone is not a Gates Foundation or any of the others who got their FCRA revoked.
This is not a priority.
It is a national emergency.
