Description
The world has witnessed a huge proliferation of social media in the recent years. Concomitant with this development, has been the everyday generation of large amounts of personal data – to the point of tremendous monetary value. However, not only does this data hold commercial merit, it also has proved to be viable for the agencies involved in surveillance by significantly lowering the cost of entry for their operations. This has resulted in, one, the development of a sophisticated form of mass surveillance on part of the intelligence and other related agencies, and second, a substantial increase in the instances of deployment of spyware. In this backdrop, and by employing India and the United States as case-studies, this paper argues that there exists a wide gap between the pace of the development of social media technology and the pace of related requisite legislative developments, and that such activities on part of the government agencies are basically based upon the exploitation of that very gap. It further substantiates that not only are such activities in contravention of the dictums of individual privacy of the citizens, but are also sinistrally utilised by the surveillance state to thwart basic political liberties.
