Data Privacy Day is a symbolic gesture, says Anand Venkatanarayanan, CFO, HasGeek

tech.hindustantimes.com:

In a freewheeling interview, Anand Venkatanarayanan, Chief Financial Officer, HasGeek and an avid privacy advocate on his blog Fractal Reality, reveals what the World Data Privacy Day really means to him and where India stands vis a vis the world when it comes to data privacy. Here are edited excerpts of the interview with HT Tech.

For me, it is a symbolic gesture. If you notice, there has been less privacy going forward since US started the Patriot act after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Ever since then, the amount of personal privacy available for people has been going down in various forms and formats across the world. Unless the long-term trend is at least halted, if not reversed, the day might not mean anything more than being a symbolic gesture.

In most of the places, when it comes to infrastructure, we have made significant developments. So, it is not like a decade ago when we did not know about data privacy. We have not been successful in rolling them out en masse because of lack of public discussion and debate on them. That is pretty concerning. If you asked me five or six years ago, we did not know how to roll out mass encryption at scale. Encryption is a pretty geeky thing. But today, we have Signal and WhatsApp that know how to give privacy to people. However, organizations are pretty slow to adapt for various reasons. That is an area of concern.

From an individual perspective, the geeky folks know how to maintain some privacy. The big elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about is the government. If you look at what has happened in European countries, the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) has exported their privacy laws across the world.

We have not been able to do that in India and that has been