Google, Facebook, AI would not exist without customers willingly sharing data: Robert Raja

Bengaluru: Data theft, leak, or misuse and cyber attacks have risen exponentially and become a global concern, across governments, institutions and technocrats.

India, today, has the distinction of being the second most targeted nation in cyber attacks, according to AI-powered digital risk monitoring platform CloudSEK.

In March, the Union Minister of State for Finance, Pankaj Chaudhary, flagged that India’s losses to cybercrime has risen 10-fold within a decade to reach Rs 177.05 crore in 2023-24. Numbers coming out of other sources are even scarier.

The Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre says Indians are likely to lose over Rs 1.2 lakh crore next year to cyber fraud. This begs the question if enough is being done or invested by the government or corporate bodies to secure the interest of Indians.

Speaking to DH, B Robert Raja, chairman and managing director of public data protection firm Odyssey Technologies Ltd, pointed out that Google and Facebook or even artificial intelligence  (AI) would not exist today, if people did not share data. “Most of these data aggregators will not exist. The so-called artificial intelligence may not exist today without that kind of aggregation of data,” he stressed.

The fact is people are choosing convenience over privacy. They are increasingly sharing private information willingly with companies, without knowing how the data will be used. “Somebody can use that data to attack you and steal money from you or tarnish your reputation. Today with AI, you can generate any kind of evidence about anybody. There is already talk of synthetic data feeding into AI. Therefore, I think we should stop worrying about the data being out there because that cat is already out of the bag,” Raja derided.

Personal data protection depends on one’s consciousness and not on the data that is out there, he argued. “The threat actually comes when we are made to lose money, reputation, opportunity - it is important that we identify where the danger lies and prevent it.”

Governments world over are combating the threat by asking people to “be careful”. But such messaging and infrastructural safeguards can go only so far, Raja cautioned.

Elephant in the room

“It is never possible by any of the infrastructural means alone to stop scamming, ordinary citizens losing lakhs of crores. That outflow will continue in spite of whatever investment made in infrastructure,” he emphasised. There are too many products competing for attention in this space, and most of them protect the infrastructure, he pointed out.

The actual problem lies in the anonymity provided by the Internet. Nothing happens to most scammers and the victim ends up with a loss. Rather than large-scale investments, it is individuals who must authenticate identities of those they are dealing with, according to Raja.

The biggest domain from which losses are arising are email scams, he said.

“For example, people have started sending us mails asking us to donate towards the India-Pakistan war. There is already a scam going on there. People encash every little opportunity, and every human tragedy. And the internet lets them do that,” he explained.

One solution for personal safety from the 1970s is asymmetric cryptography, digital signature models, that made it possible to ensure that things cannot be faked across the web, he highlighted. However, this was not used properly for this purpose, and since then, nothing has been invented - only inventions from the 1970s-80s have been re-synthesised today to offer a solution.

Having served in the Indian Revenue Service a good part of his life, Raja was also part of the investigation into the 1992 Harshad Mehta stock scam. His company produces tools to combat cyber fraud.