For a digital world, more democratic

Photo credit: The Indian Express

By Shilpa Kumar

A harmless social media “like or share” that could eventually influence an election outcome seems a far fetched illustration of the “Butterfly Effect” — a small change triggering a significant outcome. That’s what “The Great Hack” suggests. The feature film on the Cambridge Analytica saga traces the journey of personal digital data and suggests that it played a central role in crafting winning electoral strategies in large democracies like the USA and UK in 2016. It focuses attention on how small bits of digital information can have large implications and also have a bearing on an individual’s privacy.

COVID has made this an important discussion. People across the entire socio-economic continuum have been compelled to work, study, shop and entertain themselves online. What have we been revealing about ourselves online as we increasingly live digital lives? How might our data be used? How will it affect our lives? “Privacy” has become a trending topic of discussion across households and has now been catapulted beyond the elite world of technologists, think tanks and futurists.

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