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India Is Becoming A New Frontier In Mining Personal Data

This article is more than 9 years old.

My last article described how Indian marriage web sites publish far more intimate details about people than Americans are accustomed to, including details such as blood type and HIV status. These disclosures cover  millions of people. Indians are totally fine with it: the upside of revealing such details is a happier marriage. But the easier availability of aggregated personal information also poses a risk to privacy.

India’s wider approach to personal data makes for an interesting test case because of the world's largest democracy's leading role in IT and outsourcing globally. Traditionally, Indians have shown fewer sensitivities about privacy than Westerners have, although some have begun to voice concern about the issue.

Ramasamy R, a resident of a southern Indian city who did not want his full name to be published, said he was recently alarmed to find that a Google search of his name turned up his cell phone number on several sites. He decided to see if he could erase the details.

In two cases, the sites agreed to purge his data. He then used Google’s URL removal tool to erase references to those pages. He asked another site dedicated to non-profit organizations to do the same but he was told they could only suspend his account, not delete it. In a fourth instance, he had shared his contact details on Twitter while trying to get help from his satellite TV provider. He closed his Twitter account some time ago, but that data is still in circulation.

“Moral of the story: If you want to create an account in a web site, please make sure the site will delete your account and erase your data when you opt for it,” he says.

He also asked naukri.com (“jobs” in Hindi), which has more than 36 million resumes, to delete his account but said they refused. I asked about Ramasamy’s case and heard back from Sumeet Singh, senior vice president in charge of marketing at naukri.com's parent company Info Edge: “It is a requirement of the law in India that we keep all data for a period of time (this period has yet to be specified by the government).”

Info Edge says it does not sell personal data, but allows advertisers to target messages based on the content and profile of users, much as Facebook does.

“Users across the world tend to share information if they get benefits that outweigh the cost of sharing the information,” says Singh. “Indian society is under transition and the willingness to adopt Internet platforms depends on a number of variables, including familiarity with technology, platforms and cultural differences.”

The interest in gathering customer data have grown sharply in India and other developing countries as the worldwide middle class grows and direct marketers see more opportunity to sell to them.

Mailing Lists Asia (MLA) is one of the pioneers in assembling lists of consumers to rent to marketers. Set up in 1983, it has hundreds of millions of names in the Asian Pacific region, with clients including American Airlines, Maxim magazine, American Express , a leading Indian flower delivery company, Greenpeace and the Wine Society of India.

“India is now certainly opening up to direct marketing but is still very sensitive to a culture where data has been widely stolen or used without list owner knowledge or authorization,” says company founder James Thornton. “It is now widely recognized there is a legitimate list business growing in India - whereas only a few years ago the direct-marketing market consisted of grey data and stolen files being made available very cheaply.”

“There is very little understanding among middle class Indians about why personal data is gathered and for what purpose.” Thornton said. “But consumers and businessmen do respond comparatively well to direct marketing compared to the USA because they are not yet saturated and average response rates are still much higher.”

A 2012 privacy study based on 10,427 survey responses across India suggested that to date many consumers there have not given much thought to privacy implications.

“Most participants were ignorant about various privacy issues related to the Internet and social media. For example, about 75 percent of the participants had never read the privacy policy on any website that they interact with,” said the study. ”Citizens have misinformed mental models of the privacy situation; e.g. some portion of the participants felt that there is a law which protects them where there is no privacy law in India.”

People everywhere should be free to give away as much of their data as they want – as long as they understand what they are doing. And if companies, whether in India or elsewhere, are not open about their practices, attitudes will shift against them. "Indian consumers are less obsessed about privacy, however this perception could change as users' (details) find its way into the hands of advertisers,” says Gourav Rakshit, COO of Shaadi.com, the country’s largest marriage site.