According to UK-based research firm Compritech, India is one of the top three biggest surveillance states, behind only China and Russia when it comes to spying on citizens.
India scored 2.4 out of 5 on the company's privacy index, which translates to a "systemic failure to maintain privacy safeguards." Russia rated similar.
China rated as having "extensive" surveillance, while Thailand and Malaysia rated #4 and #5 with "some safeguards but weakened protections".
The survey was conducted across 47 countries, with Compritech measuring various factors like constitutional protections, privacy enforcement, biometrics, data sharing, government access to data, and more.
For one thing, India's constitution assures a right to privacy, but the lengths of it are not defined. For instance, the Aadhaar identification system has been government-mandated, which forces the collection of biometric data from citizens, and then links it to their government ID, banking systems, and more. On top of that, the Aadhaar system has been breached multiple times as well, showing that all the private data of citizens being taken from them is not even kept secured.
Then there's the recent indication that the government wants to monitor WhatsApp and be able to track and trace messages sent across the platform. They're trying to strong arm the company to break its encryption, so they can keep track of messages, supposedly to crack down on the fake news problem.
source: Indiatimes
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