SALE! SALE! SALE! - A growing market for women’s digital data

[InstituteofSocialStudiesTrust]

Seema gets scared every time her phone rings. She has been receiving calls from an unknown caller for a while who wants to be her ‘friend’. Despite her clear indication that she does not want the same, he continues to harass her. According to a Truecaller report in India, as of 2019-2020, 8 in every 10 women receive harassment and nuisance phone calls at least once a week. Most of these calls are from unknown acquaintances. The callers, through phone harassment, infiltrate the victims’ safe space, making any place with access to a phone network unsafe for the victim.

Phones, for women, are not just a medium of communication and entertainment. They also provide them with a sense of security by enabling them to reach out to family members or friends in case of any problem. Moreover, as historically, women have been kept away from the public sphere, the digital world of today provides them with the long-awaited access to the world outside the boundaries of their home. Thanks to this digital age, women’s view of the world is no longer dependent on the perspectives of their male family members.

The internet, besides becoming a key source of information for women, also offers them with opportunities to aspire for greater heights. It gives them access to a multi-dimensional life that their previous generations never experienced. Today, women are accessing the digital space to upgrade their skills and networks. They are becoming informed citizens of the country and are aware of their rights and responsibilities.

Another very important aspect of digital connectivity that has transformed the lives of women at home is leisure. Through the digital window at their fingertips, women can now access the world of entertainment.

However, phone-based and/or data-based harassment hinders the limited progress women are making and forces them back into obscurity. The offline forms of harassment are now moving into online spaces, with rapidly growing commodification of women’s digital data. The harassers, unknown to the women, ‘manage’ to get the victim’s phone number and other data from this market. Though this market is not legal or organised, it is very much active through informal networks. The seller of the data can be someone as accessible and visible as the mobile recharge shop owner/worker or can be as mystical and invisible as a stranger from the dark web.

In this market too, women, often considered as the second sex, are perceived as a tradeable commodity. The market even goes a step further by categorising and grading women's data according to their social identities and physical features. In Uttar Pradesh, the price of a women’s phone number differed according to their ‘beauty’. The demand for women’s data and the value placed on it is not homogenous and varies according to a buyer’s requirements. For example, there is a special demand for data of women of a specific religion, highlighting the communalism and misogyny in the market. The infamous Bulli Bai and Sulli Deals were purposively done to humiliate a particular community based on religion. Whereas in the case of Zivame, the intention was to instigate animosity between religions. No matter which community wins these battles, the women are certainly losing the war.

Despite continuous claims by the government and private players that our personal information is safe, we continuously experience data being hacked, sold, leaked or made public. For instance, on October 9, 2023, a hacker in the dark web agreed to sell the names, addresses, phone numbers, Aadhaar and passport details of 81.5 crore Indians for Rs. 6.5 million, according to the US cybersecurity agency, Resecurity. Anonymity of both the buyers and the sellers have given extensive power to anyone with money and resources. Data leaks have become a new reality of our society and in the interconnected world, no information is truly private. But the fact that women’s data is being monetised for the purpose of harassment is a replication of the patriarchal mindset of our society in the world of digits. The biases of the offline world are getting replicated in the online world. Seema often wonders how the man who ‘managed’ to get her number feels entitled to disrupt her privacy.

This feeling of entitlement comes from the idea that social position and superior gender gives one the right to command the life of another. Culturally, due to lack of inter-gender socialisation, there is a mystique associated with the opposite sex which comes out in a wrong and misinformed way. The media’s representation of love through stalking is one of the major promoters of harassment of women. When movies repeatedly promote stalker-turned-lover stories, the concept of consent goes down the drain. How can Seema fight harassment after Section 66A of the IT Act was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 2015?

She should file an FIR against the unknown harasser specifying all information she knows about the person. The perpetrator could be punished under Section 354A, Section 354D, Section 506, Section 507 and Section 509 of the Indian Penal Code. As far as data protection is concerned, with the Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023 in force, the data fiduciaries (apps, banks, etc.) are held accountable for protecting the data of individuals. This legal safeguard would serve as a significant protection against potential victims.

Even today, despite various provisions, women are not taking legal action against their harassers. Our society has a major role to play in this. Not only do they blame the victim for their misfortune, but they also scrutinise unrelated actions of the victims that might have led to their harassment. The blame intensifies for women who deviate, even a bit, from social norms. The women, thereby, know that if they inform families about the harassment, they might lose their mobile phones - a privilege for most. This loss would hinder them further as they will lose their independence, even if they manage to get rid of the harassers in the process. This leaves most women without much agency in the predicament, in which they navigate between tolerating harassment and gaining access to the wider world. Let’s provide our women with equal access to the digital world and safety from harassment that might impede their exploration the world. They deserve to see and experience the world through their own eyes, and it is our duty as a society to help them in this.

By  - Shipra

Research Analyst