Description:
Available open access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.
Today, privacy is more than a personal choice--it's a terrain shaped by power, politics and everyday life.
This book shifts the lens from established western narratives to India, WhatsApp's largest market, exploring how digital privacy is lived, built, and regulated on the world's digital peripheries. Drawing on rich field-based research, it examines encrypted technologies, the ties between big tech and governments, and the role of messaging apps in political life.
This is a sharp and grounded account of how privacy can both strengthen and erode democracy in the digital age.
Brief description: Philippa Williams is Professor of Geography at Queen Mary University of London.
Review Quotes:
'A sharp and timely intervention, this book reveals how planetary-scale privacy infrastructures like WhatsApp's encryption produce new frictions in public-private life, sovereignty and lived democracy in India.' Payal Arora, Utrecht University
'Rather than providing another dry, legal, regulatory and normative analysis of privacy in the digital age, Williams and Kamra provide a lucid and compelling account of the shifting corporate imaginaries and machinations of Big Tech and the everyday lived experiences of users navigating privacy. Empirically rich and theoretically sophisticated, this is a vital read for anyone interested understanding the ongoing, contested production of privacy.' Rob Kitchin, Maynooth University