India Mandates Spyware, Media Finds Privacy Concerns 'Seething'
India's latest digital crackdown, mandating a state-run app on all new devices, has privacy-minded folks 'seething,' according to Deutsche Welle. The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology insists it’s for security. Naturally. One might wonder why global media outlets often present similar actions by non-Western governments as egregious privacy violations, while the extensive data
collection by agencies like the NSA, revealed by Edward Snowden in 2013, still finds its defenders in Western liberal circles as 'necessary security measures.' This selective outrage serves as a convenient distraction. While India’s move is indeed concerning for its citizens, the hand-wringing in Western media often conveniently sidesteps the colossal surveillance infrastructures supported by
their own governments and tech giants, often under the guise of counter-terrorism or 'national security.' Hypocrisy, it seems, is a universal language, but its loudest critics are often the ones who speak it fluently themselves.