Ed. Note.: This post, by Ashwin Murthy, is a part of the NALSAR Tech Law Forum Editorial Test 2016.
For centuries rights have slowly come into existence and prominence, from the right to property to the right to vote and the right against exploitation. In the increasingly digital world of interconnection, the latest right to gain immense popularity is the right to privacy. This right entails the right to be let alone and more importantly the right to protect one’s own information – informational privacy. Thus armed with the right to privacy, one can limit what information others have access to and may use, and thus what information corporations might have or what is up on the Internet. This right to privacy comes in direct contact with applications downloaded on phones, which often ask for permissions to various information on the phone – a device which already possesses a great deal of information of the owner, including the location of the user, their phone number, their emails, their chat conversations and their photos. Applications often ask, either explicitly or in their terms and conditions, for permissions to access varying degrees of the information on the phone, sometimes in a rather unexpected fashion (such as a flashlight app asking for permissions to location), and more recently these apps have been singled out for their questionable privacy settings.
