Someone using the Indian Aadhaar biometric data system. Credits: BMN Network/Flickr. Some rights reserved.The nine-judge bench of India’s Supreme Court has just ruled that “privacy is intrinsic to freedom of life and personal liberty” guaranteed in Article 21 of the Constitution of India and qualifies as “a primal natural right”. The Court has underscored that its task was to “impart constitutional meaning to individual liberty in an interconnected world”. The judgment seeks to elaborate an idea of privacy with special attention to “technological progress” that has rendered our “lives open to electronic scrutiny.”
The lengthy text engages with the moral and legal question of privacy. But law in digital times must also grapple with the material aspects of privacy, and the social and economic consequences of specific technological architectures and how they materialise/violate/respect privacy. Privacy or its lack thereof is built in into the design of techno artifacts and becomes implicated in particular ways with particular configurations of digital paraphernalia.
