Problematizing Privacy and Surveillance from the Streets of Delhi

Two sets of arguments dominate the mainstream discourse on privacy in India. One position pushes for equal and robust rights to privacy for the poor. The view against privacy contends that privacy is an elite idea, and that the poor are willing to give up their data for better livelihood or welfare. Is privacy an elite (western) idea that the marginalized do not care about, or do they desire equal and robust rights to individual privacy? Or, is there a more complex explanation that is informed by the politics of precarity, sight and selfhood in the digital age? I interrogate these issues through a multi-year ethnography with street vendors in the Sarojini Nagar market and other street markets in Delhi to understand the perspectives and practices of those in the informal economy. I contend that individual privacy and surveillance are not the right terms with which to understand the trepidations of these marginalized communities when it comes to the politics of digital oversight. Instead, they are more concerned with the implications of digitization for recognition and inspection by the state, emanating from their history as precarious political economic actors. While street vendors maintain the myth of an autonomous individual to engage the state, they are simultaneously social subjects in kinship-caste-neighbourly relations with porous digital and material infrastructure exchange based on reciprocity. In effect, the mediation through the digital is based on dual imaginaries of personhood: of the citizens by the state (citizens using digital infrastructure and maintaining data trails as individuals) and the state by citizens (communal maintenance of digital identifications and infrastructures to fulfil the needs of their economic livelihoods, kinship obligations and be legible to the state).