The Wire Staff 
New Delhi: The Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF) has won the Global Privacy and Human Rights award in its maiden year. The award was presented at RightsCon, Access Now’s summit on human rights in the digital age, in Taipei, Taiwan.
Founder and director of IFF, Apar Gupta, while accepting the award, said that he was accepting it on behalf of every Indian who believes in the fundamental power of privacy.
“To us, this award is testament to a collective and continuing struggle that doesn’t merely begin on July 22, 2015 when the Attorney General of India stood up in the Supreme Court to challenge the status of a fundamental right to allow the continued expansion of the Aadhaar national biometric programme. Its seeds go back much further, even predating Warren and Brandeis. In the roots of our independence struggle that overthrew colonial rule to adopt a transformational constitution. A constitution that recognises the inherent capacity of human beings to achieve their full potential with liberty, equality, fraternity and social justice,” Gupta said.
Gupta said that across India and much of South Asia, privacy isn’t an “abstraction about personal space” but the difference between living a life with dignity as opposed to constantly “pleading for permission”.
“Here, the digital leash tightens based on who you are, what do you look like, how do you pray, what do you wear, who do you marry, what do you eat — who do you text, what do you stream, what do you browse — sometimes what is the print of your thumb. Here, the coercive powers of technology are increasingly being used to chain and trap us,” he said.
Gupta also referred to the increasing reliance on digital authentication, especially in welfare schemes, where it was resulting in widespread exclusions.
“Imagine being at the mercy of the authentication of a biometric system not only to board a flight but to get your monthly quota of rice and cooking oil. They’ve also exposed the precariousness of life under digital authentication, where your monthly ration of rice or cooking oil hinges on a biometric match,” he said.
He said IFF’s role alongside other similar organisations and movements has been to ensure that jargon like “surveillance capitalism” or “digital authoritarianism” does not distract from how it pervades real people’s life.
“This means we fight for it through civic literacy, in courts and India’s legislative process. When the Indian Supreme Court declared privacy a fundamental right, it was supposed to trigger a workable data-protection law. Multiple drafts and public consultations later, we still don’t have the robust framework we were promised,” Gupta said.
“Instead, we got a new Digital Personal Data Protection Act that centralises executive authority and expands the surveillance net. Even more, it threatens the right to Information and opens up researchers and journalists — those who, ironically, should be shedding light on abuses of power often to safeguard the working classes. We at IFF view the GPA award not as an accolade for our past work but encouragement for the fights that need to be fought for the right to privacy. A fight that is led by, fought alongside and for the gig workers and farmers in India who are subject to digital systems that violate their constitutional rights,” he said.