Two Minutes Older: Being Watched

“We develop in the child a desire for truth, decorum, courtesy and high-achievement,” the flyer for yet another international school says. Further down the same page, in bold red, is what the school is advertising as a Unique Feature. I am sceptical, because under Sport, they have claimed to offer carom facilities to the students. And chess. (Why did they leave out book cricket, I wonder?) Maybe this unique feature really means the children will have a bedside lamp so they don’t have to spend a fortune on batteries for their torch?

I find I'm wrong.

Unique Feature: We intend to set up CCTVs and web cams so that parents can see their children online from offices or houses, during day care hours. The intention is that the parent may be reassured of the child’s well being and also provide a platform for the parents to actually view their child learn and socialise.

This is so many kinds of wrong that I am thankful to see this is, so far, only an intention. Maybe prospective parents will be as outraged as I am and this surveillance of under-18s will come to nothing?

On the other hand, who knows about parents these days? Though Facebook’s terms of service say only those who are 18 years and over can use the social networking site, I find many children as young as nine on it. They get around this by providing a false date of birth.

Parents go through some traumas about whether to allow their children access to or forbid them from entering the virtual world. But once they’ve caved and allowed their minor children into social networking or other forms of interaction online, I don’t think any parent is going to jump through too many ethical hoops before s/he decides to ‘supervise’.

It’s a flexible word: it could mean anything from adding your child as a friend on Facebook to checking their email, to following their every move online because you’re really worried about stalkers and other online predators. It appears that even with children, privacy must be sacrificed to safety.

Once the necessity of something is acknowledged, it becomes easier to be persuaded about the means. Terror threats? Of course our malls and stores and airports need to be watched. Naturally, streets and stations, ATMs and hotels should have CCTVs. Of course we need to be x-rayed. You think it’ll help if every single thing about me – including my biometrics, where I’ve travelled and how many bank accounts I have – is accessible with one identification (such as the UID)? Sure! If you assure me it’s for my own good.

As adults living in a fearful world that looks increasingly like something Philip K. Dick might have dreamt up, I can’t help wondering if there isn’t some kind of perverse vengefulness at work here: we’re watched all the time. Why not our children? It is for their own safety. For their own good.

What could surveillance possibly add to the school experience? What are they going to do – haul up the chalk-thrower? suspend the one who passes notes? send emails home complaining that so-and-so was caught sneaking coffee into her milk during breakfast and they have the footage to prove it? Can it be that parents and teachers think this is a good way to prevent child abuse, assault and so on? (Have they watched Dibakar Banerjee’s Love, Sex Aur Dhokha?)

Any ‘truth, decorum, courtesy and high-achievement’ the students of this school might attain is likely to be false because they’re too busy trying to be someone else for the camera. Isn’t adolescent self-consciousness bad enough without this?

I might be overreacting. But it’s been thought of and that is sufficient for the idea to gain traction some day. It won’t take much to convince us that our trust in our children must be backed by evidence. Or to believe that the world is a complicated and dangerous place, and schools no less so, and that such measures are necessary.

The power that adults wield over children is vast enough. The least we can give them is some privacy in which to come into their own selves in their own time.


(An edited version of this in Zeitgeist, the Saturday edition of The New Indian Express.)

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Won't be accessing mail for a few days now. Will respond to comments when I return.

On Privacy

Usha Ramanathan in The Hindu:

The NPR is not an exercise undertaken under the Census Act 1948. It is being carried out under the Citizenship Act of 1955 and the Citizenship (Registration of Citizens and Issue of National Identity Cards) Rules 2003. Why should that matter? Because there is an express provision regarding `confidentiality' in the Census Act, which is not merely missing in the Citizenship Act and Rules but there is an express objective of making the information available to the UID Authority, for instance, which marks an important distinction between the two processes. Section 15 of the Census Act categorically makes the information that we give to the census agency “not open to inspection nor admissible in evidence.” The Census Act enables the collection of information so that the state has a profile of the population; it is expressly not to profile the individual.

It is the admitted position that the information gathered in the house-to-house survey, and the biometrics collected during the exercise, will feed into the UID database. The UID document says the information that data base will hold will only serve to identify if the person is who the person says he, or she, is. It will not hold any personal details about anybody. What the document does not say is that it will provide the bridge between the ‘silos' of data that are already in existence, and which the NPR will also bring into being. 

Paul Duguid in The Nation:

The contrasts suggest to me that, while we should continue to resist the intrusiveness of government in the American way, we would be wise to import a little more suspicion of corporations from the other side of the Atlantic. One reason is that companies are not only collecting information about us but also processing it in ways that lead to "decisional interference." Search engines make money by matching our desire to buy with someone else's interest in selling. They are coming to know so much about us, however, that they are increasingly in the position to shape our desires in the interests of their paying customers.

Not long ago, Schmidt wrote cheerfully in the Wall Street Journal about the new digital devices on which we are all expected to be reading soon. "The compact device in my hand delivers me the world, one news story at a time," he wrote. "Even better," he went on, "the device knows who I am, what I like, and what I have already read." It may well know. The question is, Who else is it telling?


That question raises concerns not only about what and how Google is selling us but also the cozy relationship between government and private corporations, for corporations increasingly gather private information that the government wants. Sometimes they are directly complicit. AT&T provided a handy room at the heart of its network for the National Security Agency to monitor huge portions of Internet and telephone communications. Yahoo and Sprint have found ready buyers in government agencies for the data they accrue.