Our parents taught us not to trust strangers. Not to answer every question they asked. Not to give away our school name, our address, or family details casually. Not to let someone into the house if they could not account for themselves. That wisdom passed through generations, shaped by a simple instinct: Certain information, once given away, cannot be taken back.
I thought about that wisdom recently in a room full of people who would have completely agreed with it, and then gone right back to scrolling.
A friend of mine had just bought a smart ring. The recommendation came from his gym trainer. They are quite friendly, so the advice did not arrive in a formal or commercial manner. If anything, that made it more trustworthy. The ring tracked sleep, heart rate, recovery scores, activity levels, and stress indicators through skin temperature. Every morning, he checked his data, adjusted his training accordingly, and discussed the numbers with his trainer. It gave him a feeling that things were under control.
And honestly, I understood the appeal. Everyone in the room wanted one. So did I. A device that could optimise your life felt efficient, aspirational, and, in the language my generation understands instinctively, extremely cool.
But when I asked where the data went, the room was silent for some seconds, then went indifferent.
One friend wanted to know, “Who is going to look at my sleep data?” Another checked whether the ring came in different colours. My friend assumed the information stayed on the app.
Nobody in that room was unintelligent. My generation cannot simply be described as ignorant. We are educated, digitally fluent, and fully aware that privacy exists as both a concept and a right. But knowing privacy exists and knowing how to practice it as a dynamic right are two different things.
The ring now gathers some of the most intimate data a body can produce and feeds it into a chain of systems neither of us can fully trace. My friend trusts his trainer, and that trust is well placed. But the data does not live only between them.
The strangers our parents warned us about are no longer behind the gate. They sit behind a permission screen, a cloud server, a smartwatch, a pair of glasses, or an app that promises to make life easier. They do not knock. They simply wait for us to click “Agree.”
The data we give away in this state of comfortable inattention is not trivial. Every OTP, KYC submission, Aadhaar-linked verification, cloud backup, edtech account, and food-delivery profile becomes part of an intimate portrait of who we are. India is not without a legal response: The Supreme Court recognised privacy as a fundamental right (Justice K S Puttaswamy & Anr vs Union of India & Ors, 2017), and the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, along with the Rules framed under it (Digital Personal Data Protection Rules, 2025), now establish a framework around consent, notice, and user rights. But what is the use of privacy being a fundamental right if we treat it as an irritation?
We need to explore models where children are taught, from a young age, that data privacy principles must be practised before they learn how to be online. Legislatures, policymakers, institutions, parents, and users share this responsibility: Before a child touches a gadget, they should know its perils too. Every step, every permission, every piece of information entered is collected data. We must instil curiosity: Where does this data go? Who uses it? Why is it needed? Should I give permission at all?
My friend still wears his ring. It tracks his sleep every night and feeds data into systems whose full journey most of us may not currently have the capability, skill set, or knowledge base to fully understand. And the questions I began asking him remain unanswered, not because he is careless, but because nobody ever made those questions feel necessary to his actual safety.
That, to me, is the real problem.
Privacy has a serious image problem. It is often described as something technical, legal, or distant, when in reality it is deeply personal. Making it feel as important as it truly is will require curriculum, conversation, media literacy, and a greater willingness from companies to be accountable for the systems they build, presenting them in a transparent and understandable manner to the very generations their marketing seeks to attract.
The challenge is not learning how to use technology. We have become remarkably good at that. The challenge is learning how to live with it, to grow alongside it rather than simply surrender to it, to enjoy its benefits while understanding its costs, and to ask better questions before we click “Agree”.
The writer is a final-year B.A. LL.B. student at Symbiosis Law School, Noida
