"Honest, upright, law-abiding citizens have nothing to fear from the distribution of their personal data." Do you agree or not? Give at least three reasons for your position and one reasonable objection to it?

 

Answer:

I have summarised m views on the above topic based on 3 factors wherein i feel that data is highly important and it can not be compromised in any case.

The 3 factors that i had discussed are:

1)data being used for unlawful purposes.

2)data being used for monetization and polarization.

3)data being used for building surveillance systems.

Step-by-step explanation

Personal data is information about a particular individual which can lead to identification of an individual.

1) Now as far the fact considering fear of distribution of personal data of a law abiding citizen concerned I feel data is utmost important and it might be used for unlawful purposes even though the person whose data is being used might be law abiding citizen. There have been numerous cases where in data breach of innocent individuals had let to troubles thereby showing that if data reaches wrong hand then it can be misued easily.

2) Data of an individual can also be monitized by different firms in order to fulfill their malicious objective. Data is also used to Polarize people. One such example is Facebook which sold the data of innocent individuals to Cambridge analytica company which allegedly used it to polarize the voters during the US Presidential elections. Here also we find the data of individuals being compromized.

3) Data of an innocent individual can be used to build a surveillance system, like the one we find in China called "China surveillance social score". Herein, the chinese government uses the social interaction and data of individual to provide a social score(similar to financial scores) which is then used to either reward or punish the people based on their preferences and social activity.

If I were to object my above stand, then i would like to quote a case wherein a personal data was given more importance as compared to national security. We find such case when Apple refused to proivde US government the data that was stored inside an Iphone of a terrorist citing personal issues as being more important when compared to national issues.

So here we find that if a person had been innocent then he or she shouldn't be scared of giving away their personal data but then this is just an example and when we look at the bigger picture we find personal data is important be it an innocent , law abiding person or a malicious one.