Everyone lies on Facebook, how do you hide your fingerprints?

Mishi Choudhary and Prof Eben Moglen write about "digital colonialism" of internet companies, such as Google, Facebook and Amazon. "Billions of people provide data about their personal lives and business activities to these companies, which are using that data as leverage to change human behaviour to their economic advantage. Governments everywhere see them as rivals to their power and also invaluable allies. India and its government too face immense challenges, but also an extraordinary opportunity, if GOI can lead India in the right direction." Europe spends vast sums of money investigating and litigating against these companies. India can show a better way. "Indian industries, providing state-of-the-art cloud services - social networking, email, travel, calendaring, on-line retailing everywhere, etc - could very profitably, given Indian cost structures, compete to provide those services to everyone in the world who has seen the error of 'free' services based on privacy invasion, and wants an alternative she can pay for, with confidence in the privacy technology that is all open source, and works in their interest rather than someone  else's." Pious thoughts. But what about the government? We can avoid using Facebook or Amazon, and a majority of people lie on Facebook. WhatsApp is encrypted end-to-end, which means that no one, not even the company itself, can read our messages. UK Home Secretary, Amber Rudd accused the company of helping terrorists. Governments demand that companies leave a backdoor which they can use to spy on citizens but companies say that cyber criminals will quickly find such a vulnerability. Apple CEO. Tim Cook called backdoors "the software equivalent of cancer". While we can defend ourselves against private companies we are totally helpless against the might of the state, which is defined as a centralized government that maintains a monopoly of the legitimate use of force within a certain territory. The Indian government is enforcing compulsory use of biometric identity number for legitimate business, including filing tax returns and the Attorney General argued in front of the Supreme Court that Indians have no right to privacy. Companies  change consumer behavior through advertising and there is nothing to stop them doing population surveys. Companies try to lure us to spend, politicians want to subjugate us. About biometric identity cards the same Prof Eben Moglen wrote in April,"If government does not have a positive responsibility to protect the privacy of the citizens, including against itself, then the technologies of behaviour collection now being grafted into the nervous system of humanity we call the internet will make new, hyper-efficient modes of despotism inevitable." Precisely. Already happening in India.