Privacy: US and India Invaded by Big Social and Govt Partnerships Against You

[grarpamp]

https://www.huffingtonpost.in/entry/india-aadhuar-tech-companies_us_5b7ebc53e4b0729515109fd0

For the past nine years, India has been building the world's biggest
biometric database by collecting the fingerprints, iris scans and
photos of nearly 1.3 billion people. For U.S. tech companies like
Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook, the project, called Aadhaar (which
means "proof" or "basis" in Hindi), could be a gold mine. The CEO of
Microsoft has repeatedly praised the project, and local media have
carried frequent reports on consultations between the Indian
government and senior executives from companies like Apple and Google
(in addition to South Korean-based Samsung) on how to make tech
products Aadhaar-enabled. But when reporters of HuffPost and HuffPost
India asked these companies in the past weeks to confirm they were
integrating Aadhaar into their products, only one company -- Google --
gave a definitive response.

That's because Aadhaar has become deeply controversial, and the
subject of a major Supreme Court of India case that will decide the
future of the program as early as this month. Launched nine years ago
as a simple and revolutionary way to streamline access to welfare
programs for India's poor, the database has become Indians' gateway to
nearly any type of service -- from food stamps to a passport or a cell
phone connection. Practical errors in the system have caused millions
of poor Indians to lose out on aid. And the exponential growth of the
project has sparked concerns among security researchers and academics
that India is the first step toward setting up a surveillance society
to rival China.


https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/26/technology/tech-industry-federal-privacy-law.html

In recent months, Facebook, Google, IBM, Microsoft and others have
aggressively lobbied officials in the Trump administration and
elsewhere to start outlining a federal privacy law, according to
administration officials and the companies. The law would have a dual
purpose, they said: It would overrule the California law and instead
put into place a kinder set of rules that would give the companies
wide leeway over how personal digital information was handled. "We are
committed to being part of the process and a constructive part of the
process," said Dean Garfield, president of a leading tech industry
lobbying group, the Information Technology Industry Council, which is
working on proposals for the federal law. "The best way is to work
toward developing our own blueprint." The efforts could set up a big
fight with consumer and privacy groups, especially as companies like
Facebook face scrutiny for mishandling users' personal data. Many of
the internet companies depend on the collection and analysis of such
data to help them target the online ads that generate the bulk of
their revenue.