Two months ago—for the first time ever—WhatsApp messenger put out a front-page advertisement in major Indian newspapers, each read by millions. “Respect for your privacy is coded into our DNA,” the ad claimed, detailing what had changed in its recent privacy policy update. In over a week, it escalated into a business crisis as hordes of Indian users joined more privacy-conscious rival messenger apps.

According to Business Insider’s survey, Telegram gained 47% of WhatsApp users because of its extra security offerings. And more than 45% of users were apprehensive about WhatsApp’s new privacy policy, based on media reports.

The uproar led to WhatsApp’s postponing the option to accept its privacy policy until May 2021. 

The latest battle in today’s privacy wars is taking place on new ground—instead of messenger apps, the technology in contention is Search.

Last week, DuckDuckGo—“an internet search engine that emphasizes searchers’ privacy and avoids the filter bubble of personalized search results”—wrote a blog post telling users to stop using Google Chrome. It warns that users have automatically entered Chrome’s new tracking method called Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC), and offers an extension to block it. 

With FLoC, Google replaces the third-party cookie that tracked users as they browsed the web so as to profile them for targeted ads. Google is positioning FLoC as a more privacy-friendly method to target audiences, releasing a comic to explain why. 

Instead of planting cookies on the users’ devices, which send personal data to centralised servers so personalisation algorithms can run on them, FLoC allows the algorithms to run on the user’s device itself. It then assigns users to groups with similar interests.

By not needing data to leave users’ devices, and by mining it at the group-level instead of the user-level, Google claims to effectively decentralise personalisation and improve privacy. It also promises at least 95% of the conversions per dollar spent when compared to cookie-based advertising.

FLoC is supposed to be Google’s major first step in its vision for a privacy-first web and future. “People want assurances that their identity and information are safe as they browse the web … FLoC proposes a new way for businesses to reach people with relevant content and ads,” Google explains in its blog posts. Acknowledging an erosion of trust, it cites research that 72% of people feel that what they do online is being tracked by advertisers and tech companies and that 81% believe that risks from data collection outweigh its benefits.

Today, consumers’ increasing privacy-consciousness presents a complication for technologies—called the Personalisation-Privacy paradox. Widely-used personalised services—such as Spotify and Netflix recommendation engines or Google’s search engine and targeted ad systems—deliver personalisation by collecting vast amounts of personal user data. But both personalisation and privacy are desirable to consumers, presenting a trade-off and the difficult question of what level of privacy-cum-personalisation to optimise for.

This is the big question that different groups of society are grappling with today, including:

• Tech companies like Google, Facebook, and DuckDuckGo, who create technologies for consumers
• Advertisers—other businesses—who pay tech companies to advertise to their users
• Regulators and researchers, who shape policy in this industry. And, finally,
• Consumers like you and me who actually use personalised internet technologies, like Google Search, and are shown ads by tech companies

The fact that third-party cookies send personal data from people’s devices to companies’ servers—where users would have no control over them—caused them to be blocked by Mozilla’s Firefox and Apple’s Safari browsers as far back as 2013. 

Chrome is the last major browser—and the biggest—to phase them out. But it is also the first to propose a new vision for technology that both achieves personalisation and controls for user privacy. According to research on the models of privacy-preserving APIs, federated learning represents a seismic jump in the way consumer internet technologies are designed.

Along with DuckDuckGo, data ethics researchers, privacy advocates, lawmakers, and other businesses have slammed Google’s FLoC, arguing that it is bad for user privacy. By grouping people based on browsing interest, cohort-based targeting can enable deliberate harm or targeting of specific sets of people, and also exacerbate the problems inherent to algorithmic categorisations of humans. 

It can make existing tracking methods more powerful; adtech firms or hackers can use fingerprinting techniques, where individual pieces of data about someone’s device are used to decipher their identity. Somebody’s FLoC ID then becomes a powerful data point, helping to distinguish their browser from only a few thousand others instead of a few hundred million.

But Google has repeatedly clarified that multiple teams are working to ensure that cohorts are not classified by any sensitive issues—such as race, sexuality, or medical history—by extensively testing and reconfiguring the algorithms.

As for advertisers—the other online businesses who buy ads on Google and pay it for every click and conversion—they tend to be marketers, like myself, forced to read many articles on the implication of such developments on their professions. The inability to track users across websites is expected to cause a resurgence in older strategies for online businesses, including emphasis on first-party data and contextual targeting, which is advertising based on what someone is browsing rather than past behaviour.

Google is aware of these implications for its ad business, which made up for 80% of its parent Alphabet’s revenues as of 2019. But it believes that not conforming to consumers’ higher standards for privacy will be anti-competitive.  

Multiple data breaches and the rising demand for privacy has led governments to adopt new regulations. The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)—implemented in May 2018 to give consumers more control over their data—prevents Google’s FLoC from being tested in Europe. But other regions, including India and the US, are seeing “origin trials” of the new technology.

FLoC is currently deployed to 0.5% of Chrome users, who have been enrolled automatically, without consent or even notice. The team wants to increase this sample to 5%, at which point tens of millions of users will become part of the test. In response, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has set up AmIFloCed?, a tool for users to find out if their browser is part of Google’s trials.

While research shows that overall knowledge of privacy concerns are on the rise, it also indicates that consumers don’t know how to protect themselves. In the rapidly evolving privacy landscape, an individual has to wrestle with complex cognitive biases to even navigate the subject. People’s uncertainty about what data sharing online really involves, its trade-offs with performance and control over data, and the differences in privacy levels across the web—all of this make processing information about privacy that much harder. There is even a sub-paradox within the Personalisation-Privacy question, called the Privacy Paradox, which highlights the discrepancies between people’s reported attitudes to privacy and their actual behaviours.

On the day of WhatsApp’s front-page ads, amidst the flurry of notifications I got every time a contact joined Telegram or Signal (both of which run on donations and are free to use), a friend SMS’ed me for the first time in ages. She wrote, “In protest against Facebook’s growing ecosystem, I have decided to step away from all its social media. One doesn’t know the whole truth, but protection of privacy is available on less capitalistic alternatives.”

For the past two weeks, not a day has passed by without friends or family desperately reaching out, trying to find ways to procure remdesivir, an antiviral drug given through injections to patients hospitalised due to Covid-19. 

Source : Twitter

The second wave hit India unawares and the acute shortage of the drug started stinging patients. 

Despite there not being solid evidence that remdesivir actually helps save lives, it is the only antiviral drug of choice doctors are placing their bets on at the moment. Even as the pandemic raged on since March 2020, remdesivir emerged as an option only in July. It made dashing sales till October-November before cases receded and the demand dropped. We wrote about the mad rush for Covid-related drugs in The Ken in January this year.

And while the drug is in short supply, political parties are looking out for brownie points by fanning the fires. Take for instance, India’s ruling party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). In the western state of Gujarat, the BJP office in the city of Surat has been distributing free remdesivir injections since last week. And BJP’s state party chief CR Paatil had promised to dole out 5,000 doses sourced from pharma manufacturer Zydus Cadila. 

Source: Twitter

Paatil’s claims raised eyebrows, what with a political party hoarding crucial anti-covid drugs. Especially a drug that Vinod Paul, member of think-tank Niti Aayog, warned was only to be prescribed in hospital settings and procured by hospital authorities directly. But the situation on the ground is different. Patients are thronging pharmacy stores to buy the drug and the price at which each vial of it is sold varies wildly between seven manufacturers. 

Except for Zydus Cadila which sells remdesivir at Rs 899 (US$12) per vial (down from Rs 2,800 (US$40) per vial; a price it was sold at earlier this year), none of the other manufacturers have reduced costs. This includes Hetero and Dr Reddy’s which sell it for Rs 5,400 (US$72) per vial or Jubiliant Life Sciences and Mylan which sell it at close to Rs 4,800 (US$65) per vial or even Cipla and Sun Pharma which sell it at Rs 4,000 (US$53) per vial. 

By September 2020, remdesivir became the mainstay for patients with severe Covid after having found its way into the government’s treatment guidelines, while the demand for other drugs waned. Over the past year, it has made a killing in sales; at Rs 468.73 crore (US$63 million), it stands highest amongst major Covid drugs of choice. 

By the end of this week, all players have promised to the government to bring down the cost to Rs 3,500 (US$46.73) per vial. India stopped exporting remdesivir earlier this week, but the politicking and the corporatisation is not serving the patients that might need it the most. 

The number of India’s daily Covid-19 cases are climbing. A complete nationwide lockdown like last year seems to be out of the equation since the damage it wrought on the economy was clear for everyone to see—loss of jobs and incomes, and a plummeting GDP. However, localised lockdowns are being implemented. And that’s leading to a second exodus of migrants back to their villages. 

Just that this time, the images of struggling children and women that were a feature of the first exodus have been replaced by visuals of mostly single and male migrants.

After the first bout of reverse migration, many families were left behind in the hinterlands, even as the male family members departed back to the city. And with male migrants heading back to villages again, it’s a section of the womenfolk who will, once more, face stress. 

And that could lead women into an even bigger debt-trap as they struggle to make ends meet. 

But, what if the male members aren’t scarred by the experience of losing jobs and scrambling back to their hometowns twice within a year, and they decide to go back to the cities again in the hope of building a better life? If the first lockdown was a lesson, it’s unlikely that the families are going to accompany them. And that could lead to another problem. One with far-reaching consequences. 

Globally, studies have already shown the adverse impact on children when they get left behind.

How India’s policymakers deal with changing migration patterns and its impact on women’s welfare and children’s education could spell out the future of India’s hinterlands.

On Monday, we wrote about the return of unapologetic out-of-office emails and asked if you’d used any in the past year. Here are a couple of quirky ones from our subscribers.

From Iresh:

From Guru: