It's a shame that Facebook is not notifying users that their data has been breached. This is personal information that has been breached, impacting over 500 million users worldwide and, from what I've read, an estimated 6.1 million users in India. At the same time, in India you have Mobikwik denying that their data has been leaked, when many users, including me, were able to validate data on the website put up by the hackers. What indicated to me that the data is mine was the fact that it had the accurate date of the creation of my Mobikwik account in 2013, when, in order to inflate its user base, the company had created wallet accounts for users without their content, based on transactions being made via its payment gateway Zaakpay. How could they deny the validity of the leak/breach? A fundamental question around data today is about its ownership: who owns a user's data? Is it the user, on whom the data is based, or the company which collects this data? Do we transfer ownership of our data when we subscribe to a service? What about data that is co-created, based on our usage of services? India's Personal Data Protection Bill has attempted to address some of these issues by treating companies as "data fiduciaries" instead of owners of data. Fiduciary means trustee. This means that we do not trade our data when we subscribe to a service: we entrust a company with our data. Trust is at the…
