Bit-sized story, not the whole truth

A warning that without a data protection law, we might drown in data to lose our wisdom.

- SOMA DAS

Have we entered the era of too much data and too little wisdom? That’s the sense one gets in Private and Controversial, a book edited by Smriti Parsheera that warns us against dire unforeseen consequences if all our health data is consolidated at one source by the state without a law that protects the data and rights of citizens effectively. As India builds its grand digital health infrastructure, different subject experts write on varied themes in the book to explore critical fault lines, where tension lurks between public health and privacy rights, and ask us uncomfortable questions about our readiness to deal with our datafied bodies and minds.

A datafied life, fragile truth… Covid-19 turned out to be the world’s first data-driven pandemic, in which data shaped our policies, our understanding of the health crisis, and our language, peppered with expressions like ‘flattening the curve’, ‘doubling rate’. Beneath a deluge of data projects by governments, the private and not-for-profit sectors, the source of most such data remained the state, a chapter tells us. Even as data is being treated as equal to knowing, is our understanding of the pandemic correct and complete? Do we know how many people died post-vaccination? How did Covid-19 cause deaths across socioeconomic groups? What happened to non-Covid-19 medical cases? As data swelled, so did misinformation, and mistrust in data.

The authors reckon that what kind of data gets captured depends on who are the actors in deciding, maintaining, and accessing such data. And if the state is the sole actor, the stories we are told are probably skewed. Data doesn’t equal truth, and if we base our truths on fragments of data, our truths remain fragile.