From this month, it is mandatory for citizens investing money in various deposits to fill up a “Know Your Client” form where the depositor has to provide personal details, not just about income or PAN (Permanent Account Number allotted by the Income Tax department) but also information about family members, number of children, whether one owns a house, or rents it, car ownership, mobile number and e-mail IDs. Many citizens have raised doubts about the propriety of making such information mandatory, especially since such personal details seem to be distributed for sale to marketing teams, with impunity.

Try buying a train ticket online, and the screen wants information not just about your name and address but also whether you are married, how many children you have, etc. Why and how are these details relevant for buying a train ticket for oneself? Similarly, credit card forms harvest a lot of information that is personal and not at all relevant to the financial status of the applicant.

Revealing one’s e-mail ID to commercial companies results in a lot of promotional spam coming in and clogging one’s inbox. Even vsnl — from whom I cannot hide my e-mail ID if I have an internet account with them — sends promotional messages containing a lot of visuals and graphics which take a lot of time to download, which means I end up paying for their advertisements which they send at my expense (since I pay for the internet time).

Bangalore based scientist Srikanth Sastry narrates his experience of trying to register for a connection for receiving television channels through a well-known private server. After purchasing a dish antenna to receive the service he finds that the company wants him to fill in a number of “mandatory” details including replies to question about whether he owns an air-conditioner, likes to watch movies and DVDs, whether he loves shopping and travelling, and whether he has children (with their dates of birth).

Since these answers are mandatory, he cannot register without filling in the information which he suspects, gets passed on to telemarketing companies which then harass you with unwanted, unsolicited calls at all odd hours (or send promotional e-mails or SMS). This is clearly an invasion of privacy and he lodged a complaint in December 2007 after many rounds of talking to various agents, asking that they should either remove the “mandatory” clause and make such information optional, or reimburse him for the money spent on buying a dish. Two months later, nothing has happened. He has wasted not only money but also a lot of time calling various numbers about this.

Nowhere in its web page, he points out, does the company  mention that the personal details supplied will be held confidential. “I believe that legally, they should not be allowed to collect such personal information without giving the customer the right to refuse, and the guarantee that they will not disclose it”, he argued, asking that they  either change their registration website in a manner that takes care of his concern, or failing that, cancel his subscription and compensate him for the cost of purchase and installation of the satellite dish.

His concern is real because despite the national Do Not Call Registry (for blocking unwanted calls from marketers) subscribers of landlines and cellphones continue to receive a huge number of calls, from banks (offering loans or credit cards) or financial companies, and such calls are a huge distraction during work hours. You can leave a marketing leaflet in your mailbox unopened but a phone call is definitely intrusive.

Even receiving a simple courier package involves having to put down one’s telephone number. “To check if the delivery has been done properly,” one company said when I questioned the need for revealing my telephone number, but in all these years I have never, ever, had a single call to “check” about a courier delivery.

If development and progress is about greater privacy and autonomy for the individual, then modern lives are anything but developed. There is more intrusion today than there was a generation ago, especially with the awesome snooping that has been made possible by advanced technology — you can record sound and images, even video, on a hand held cellphone, you can zoom in on a woman’s cleavage card code using remote controlled miniature cameras, you can tap a telephone line or bug a room quite unobtrusively, to snoop on private conversations. This also means unwelcome e-mail spam when IDs are “harvested”.

Once one’s phone numbers and e-mail IDs are harvested, anyone can access them, irrespective of the right to privacy.  A recent report in a British paper calls this “more dangerous than plutonium that continues to pose a danger years after it gets released”. If a bank or company has my personal details, I have no control over whether the information is “leaked”, and to whom — and that makes me as vulnerable (to swindles, snooping, blackmail, whatever) as residents of Chernobyl were, to the radiation leak. It is time for a collective protest against such unwarranted intrusion.