INDIA - World’s Biggest Data Mine
They are the apps every Indian has on their phone—the one where you order your taxi, your food, find your next date. Innocuous, everyday, unremarkable to billions around the world.
In India, these are also potentially the apps telling politicians everything they could possibly want to know about you—whether you want them to or not.
And India’s combination of high smartphone take-up and lax regulations allowing private companies to sell data mean that most political parties have gathered “the data to do everything”—even down to knowing “what you are eating today,” claims political strategist Rutwik Joshi.
But perhaps the bigger question is: why should you care?
Microtargeting—described by Privacy International as the use of personal data “to target you with information and adverts to an unprecedented degree of personalization”—is not new when it comes to elections.
In India, the problem is compounded because it’s “a data society that was planned and built by the government without any safeguards,” says data and security researcher Srinivas Kodali.
Indeed, there are some 650m smartphones users in the country—all boasting apps which could potentially share their data with a third party.
-www.bbc.com, 25 May 2024
Arno's Commentary
India has surpassed China as the world’s largest country in terms of population, now with over 1.4 billion people.
India is also the world’s largest democracy, and its economy is growing rapidly. The country is destined to be the third largest economy by 2027, according to Forbes.
While GDP per capita stands at $7,100, and life expectancy at 68.2 years, it is noteworthy that over 16% of the workforce is employed in agriculture. A large part of that percentage will merge into progressive industrialization.
The BBC article by Meryl Sebastian deals with information; in this case, political. What was impossible before the internet revolution is now globally workable. What can you share, and what can be kept private? That is one of the key questions. A well-designed, information-sharing platform can indeed significantly influence political elections.
This again brings us to the point of globalism. A Google search reveals that in India, there are about 121 major languages, with 19,500 dialects. That makes it the most multilingual country in the world.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) to the rescue! A political candidate can speak in his own language yet instantaneously be translated into multiple others. During a visit to our office by Norbert Lieth and Jonathan Malgo at the beginning of the year, they showed us a video demonstrating, for example, Norbert Lieth speaking Dutch fluently, while co-worker Fredy Peter spoke virtually accent-free Arabic (neither speak those languages).
Of the false prophet, we read: “And he exerciseth all the power of the first beast before him, and causeth the earth and them which dwell therein to worship the first beast, whose deadly wound was healed” (Revelation 13:12). Note the words, “and causeth the earth and them which dwell therein”; today, that’s entirely possible. When Mr. 666 arrives on the scene, he will mimic Pentecost. “And they were all amazed and marvelled, saying one to another, Behold, are not all these which speak Galilaeans? And how hear we every man in our own tongue, wherein we were born?” (Acts 2:7-8).
The good news for the Church is that the Antichrist system, at work for over 2,000 years, is rapidly approaching its target. Subsequently, the Church must be removed.
Arno Froese is the executive director of Midnight Call Ministries and editor-in-chief of the acclaimed prophetic magazines Midnight Call and News From Israel. He has authored a number of well-received books, and has sponsored many prophecy conferences in the U.S., Canada, and Israel. His extensive travels have contributed to his keen insight into Bible prophecy, as he sees it from an international perspective.
