• With the electoral process tapping data, a data protection framework must uphold a voter's informational autonomy.
• There was a massive outcry against the hiring of Cambridge Analytica (a data mining & analytics firm) by political parties.
• This highlights the need for regulating social media platforms by way of a comprehensive data protection law.
• This law should take issues such as political micro-targeting seriously.
• Recently, a draft of the data protection law, the Personal Data Protection Bill, 2019, has been introduced.
• In the Internet age, any such law must be aware of the potential impact of social media companies in shaping public opinion.
• The current draft empowers the Centre to notify social media intermediaries/interfaces as significant data fiduciaries if their user base crosses a certain threshold and whose actions are likely to have an impact on electoral democracy.
• Need of greater citizen participation to ensure that digital tools are used for enhancing democracy and not for harvesting personal data for voter targeting.
• Earlier, the idea was to capture mass issues. But in the present day and age, the focus of the campaign is the individual.
• With online presence being a key source of competitive advantage in today’s world, political parties are deploying strategies to tap into the fragmented political discourse by catering to the individual are at a rise.
• Increase in use of tailor-made messages on data driven approaches.
• Profiling of voters has raised huge concerns of data privacy for individuals and has become a burning issue for debate.

Beyond Internet Governance

• Although, each jurisdiction debating the issue may have distinct factors influencing the final shape of the Internet governance model, the reasons for the initial debate are common to all – to arrest any negative externalities emerging out of the Internet. – to limit the ill-effects and privacy related issues.
• Any forward-thinking regulatory framework needs to have both supervisory mechanisms in place as well as effective law enforcement tools in its quiver.
• This is not particularly characteristic of Indian politics - US & European countries are equally affected by the impact of this unregulated practice of micro-targeting.
• Over the years, political advisory and advertising firms have devised sophisticated tools to gather voter data and made proper campaign products out of it.
• The politicians of today's age leave no stone unturned while canvassing for votes and the passive users are just not aware of what they are being subjected to.

Unregulated zone

• The entire business of collecting personal data continues to remain unregulated and is also proprietary in nature.
• There is difficulty in tracing the methods used by such firms to scrutinise the personal life and intimate details of the individual.
• There is a rise in the number of political firms which are making most use of the right to freedom of speech & expression which is near absolute in countries like the US.
• There is serious harm to the country's democratic nature resulting on account of loss of informational autonomy.

Way forward

• The liberating and anti-establishment potential of the Internet are considered as a promise for the health of a liberal democracy.
• At the same time, it can have serious ramifications if this potential is used by demagogues to spread fake news and propaganda.
• Although the need of a digital revolution cannot be denied, the regulatory efforts regarding different spheres of its influence should be more than merely reactionary.
• The innovators continue to develop more advanced technologies and the regulators are unable to catch up with it.
• There are infinite contours of this information age, and also, of our society, therefore, the scope of a data protection framework needs to be sensitive towards the magnitude of a variety of data usage.
• The electoral process in India is becoming increasingly advanced in terms of use of data and is likely to start using the same tactics as used in the US for targeting individual voters.
• The need of a regulatory framework with citizen participation is a must.
• Giving tag of Significant Data Fiduciary tag to social media platforms is a positive step if and where it also ensures Right to Privacy for the users.