Dheeraj Kalgutkar

Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash We have long-established that Facebook, that big mammoth of an organization today knows more about us than we do ourselves. The feat has lost its vanity, it isn't cool anymore. It is not a fact that you clap to when a magician or card-reader reveals something about you that you yourself might have overlooked. You submit voluntarily to them, not so much to Facebook. Facebook today stores far greater information about you than the tidbits you provide to it yourself. And it uses that enormous information to decide what you like, what you might be interested in, what kind of deaths will disturb you more, what news you might be interested to read, what videos pick your interest, which political party you might vote to, are you a fence-sitter, essentially it knows you. You might be confused about what you wish to eat for dinner tonight but I bet Facebook if given a chance will tell you exactly what will interest you at the dinner table. Th...

Recently I received a joining letter from a reputed IT company of India which has its headquarters in Bengaluru (or Bangalore). There wasn't much to the joining letter except mentioning Aadhaar card as the mandatory document for onboarding. Now for people living under rocks, Aadhaar card is a new identity card issued by the government of India that captures not just your name, address, and photograph but also biometric information like fingerprints and iris scanning. Every Indian already owns one or the other existing identity cards that up to this time were all that was required, but for some reasons all-of-a-sudden they have all been pushed to corners in a new world where Aadhaar has taken center stage. I have never understood the purpose of Aadhaar or the problem that it resolves or what was it that existing identity cards didn't solve which Aadhaar can; except of course the behemoth of a tool called surveillance that Aadhaar can so easily accomplish for corporates and g...