Diverging Views on Tech

In his terrific book on the impact of software on the world, Coders, Clive Thompson points out that:

“In recent years, a welter of computer languages aimed at children – like MIT’s popular Scratch language – and initiatives like Hour of Code and robotics competitions (have sprung up).”

 

In the US, privacy concerns have hit even such for-kids options. In Chicago, for example, public schools suddenly found the plug pulled on many such popular options because, hey, they violated some students online protection laws.

“Among the software products that violate the law, CPS (Chicago Public Schools) now says, are programs like Code.org, which is widely used in computer science classes, and Adobe applications used for artistic design and newspaper page layouts. That left has many high school newspapers unable to produce their print editions. Also off limits is Scratch, software to create interactive stores, animations and games.”

Most for-kids languages these days work online, the benefit being that you can continue using them seamlessly across home, school and anywhere else. Being online also makes it easy to share and find programs easily. No wonder then that many teachers complain that the new student data protection law has “upended the computer science curriculum”.

 

Or look at the Western privacy concerns wrt facial recognition. Facebook, which can identify your friends in your photos and suggest tagging them, is considering turning off the feature. Some US states have already banned blanket facial recognition from use by cops for law and order purposes.

 

The contrast on all such matters between the West on the one hand, against India and China, on the other hand, is stark. Those very for-kids languages, created by Americans, have the most users not in the US, but in India and China (My daughter’s school started with Scratch). China uses facial recognition for everything: from identifying oneself at shops for billing and pickup, to yes, monitoring dissent in “troublesome” areas.

 

In India, as digitization of records has increased, it opened up other opportunities. Companies can now get the relevant data (shop count, hospital bed count etc) if it is relevant to their business. The government gets revenue by making that data available. Privacy concerns? Karnataka, for example, has a Karnataka Open Data Policy which governs the use of such public data e.g. it has to be anonymized (details like name, address, ID details and religion should be removed before the data is shared).

 

No, anonymization isn’t perfect. Yes, China can (has?) become a surveillance state. But while India and China are leaning towards the reward side, is the West shooting itself in the foot by going overboard in the risk side of the equation?

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