Privacy 3.0 : Unlocking Our Data - Driven Future

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Aadhaar. Never before has a technology so radically polarised India. There are those who are excited by the possibilities it has opened up, while doomsayers only see all the harms that would arise if it is misused. In many ways, the visceral opposition to Aadhaar stems from the fact that it is Indias first brush with an indigenous technology that calls into question our understanding of privacy. Around the world, whenever a new technology has come up with implications on privacy like the printing press, the telegraph and portable cameras society initially opposed it violently before eventually learning to adjust to its drawbacks in order to benefit from its advantages. We are at a similar crossroads today. In a world where people live their lives in full public view on social media and where data is the new oil, the advantages of big data are undeniable. At the same time, we have already seen the harms that can arise if this new technology is poorly deployed. What we need is a framework that can safeguard privacy while still unlocking the potential of a data-driven future. In this pioneering work, technology lawyer Rahul Matthan traces the changing notions of privacy from the earliest times to its evolution in law through landmark cases in the UK, US and India, and re-imagines the way we think about privacy so that we can take full advantage of the modern data-driven world. He argues for an entirely new approach to thinking about privacy, cautioning against getting so obsessed with the harms that may befall us if our privacy is violated that we design our laws to prevent that from occurring at all costs.

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Rahul Matthan is a partner with the law firm Trilegal and heads its TMT (technology, media and telecommunications) practice. He has been working on issues relating to technology law for over two decades and has been involved in a number of policy initiatives at the intersection of law, society and technology. His active involvement in the privacy policy space has given him a unique view into how these issues evolved in the country. He was involved in some of the early drafting of a privacy law that, for various reasons, eventually did not get enacted. He has served as a member of the Technology Sub-Committee of the Reserve Bank of Indias Committee on Household Finance, where he authored the section on privacy. More recently, his Discussion Document entitled Beyond Consent A New Paradigm for Data Protection explored a new way of addressing the privacy challenges in the data world. Rahul advises on a wide range of regulatory issues, including in relation to privacy, map regulation, fintech, encryption, spectrum regulation, e-commerce, sharing economy, biotech, digital content and streaming media. He was included in the Mints list of 25 People Who Matter in Indian E-Commerce. He is a frequent speaker and has a weekly column in Mint called Ex Machina, where he writes on technology, law and everything in between. Rahul lives in Bangalore with his wife Ahalya, their eleven-year-old son Dhruv and their two dogs Coco and Zoey.