Dinesh Kamath's Editorial 'Internet believes in Right To Information' that was published in Newsband

Internet believes in Right To Information

Adam Smith wrote that it is the fear of becoming “the proper object of the contempt and indignation of mankind” that enforces our moral codes. Thirty years’ experience of social networks on the internet has proved that the Scottish philosopher was right. The Twitter mob, the skulking trolls and other hate figures of our time are evidences. Hence there is a need to remove some degree of privacy on the internet.

Freedom for users is an unmixed good. Human political authorities are not God and are not perfectly good and disinterested. They cannot be trusted with omniscience, or even with too much knowledge and power. Every web browser now has a “privacy mode” to allow people to do things – however legal – that they wouldn’t want others to find in their browsing history.

There has been a lot of discussions of freedom and privacy on the internet. The enemies of democracy and of honesty in public life depend far more on anonymity than on privacy. What is concealed by privacy-enhancing technologies is not the content of the messages but their purpose and origin. This encryption depends on mathematical principles that are accessible to anyone. The technology itself is, in this limited sense, democratic.

In China there is no such thing as a legal and private channel of communication for the authorities to ban. Everything is eavesdropped on and watched by the state. The Chinese model is one that tempts governments everywhere, and it can’t be resisted entirely by high-minded appeals to principle.

Privacy is one of the things that we need to be fully human that is the strongest defence of private, encrypted communications online. There are many people who buy into the 'nothing to hide, nothing to fear' line. The digital world, especially social media, is just another panoptic structure. Transparency seems to be the norm in civil society so individuals have to pay for privacy. But in political society privacy is free and so we have to pay for political transparency.

You can’t expect privacy in a country that has wholeheartedly accepted that CCTV spying is completely accepted, that no longer accepts that a person's home is their castle.

It is basically all about the fact that 21^st century gave us technological tools possible to be used in different ways; and in the same way it was in the 20^th century and all the centuries before. We can become as per the way we use, manage or depend on these tools. In that respect, history has shown the outcomes. If the 21^st century is all about the mis-use of repositories or data, or about the way we create 'news' to steer views, our society will be punished rightly so. There are and will be always two choices.

And before anyone can make intelligent decisions about what to do with 'smart' SocialMedia technologies, many more people need more reliable, practical knowledge about the following issues: => How to regulate mobile Internet in ways that free innovation and promote competitions without undermining the foundation of democratic societies => The interdisciplinary dynamics of cooperation systems, natural and artificial => The cognitive, interpersonal, and social effects on mobile, pervasive, always on media => How ubiquitous mobile Internet access and information embeded in places might reshape not only cities but our democratic societies - and not only to its best attention!

The rights of citizens to consume a large variety of information as well as to disseminate their own information widely (recent "S...-hole" tweet) held a great risk of losing fundamental ethical "DNA" within the metabolism of social media and internet values akin 'meta-technologies'.

But we can do wonderful things together, if enough people learn how. But technologies and methodologies of Web / SoMe cooperations are kind of embryonic today, and the emergence of democratic, convival, intelligent new social forms depends on how people appropriate, adopt, transform, and perhaps reshape the new media once they are out of the hands of engineers (coders) - as people always do.

The convergence of smart social media technologies is inevitable. The way we choose to use these technologies and the way governments will allow us to use them are very much in question today.