The line that divides surveillance and intrusion is thin — and blurring by the day. At least in the social media sphere. Take, for example, Mumbai police’s social media lab launched on March 17 to, what they call, monitor what is happening on social media and be “better prepared” to meet any untoweard turn of events in case people want to use their democratic right to gather in large numbers and protest against something they feel is wrong. 

The word ‘monitor’ is again tricky, because even after several reports of how Mumbai police is going to monitor people’s Facebook and Twitter activity, additional commissioner of police (protection) Nawal Bajaj denied that that was the motive of the lab. 
 

“Monitoring is a bad word; it means that we are keeping an eye on what people are saying. We are essentially keeping a tab on the pulse of the public — what they think, want and expect from the police — for managing situations better,” Bajaj told Governance Now. “We are trying to tailor our responses according to the expectations of the people,” he said. 
 

A software, developed in-house, will help keep a tab on what people are thinking and talking about in the city and the subject attracting the most chatter on social media, he explained. 
 

Apart from that, Bajaj said, the lab will also check tweets and Facebook posts (and other online content) of important political leaders, opinion leaders and religious leaders. “We will use (software) packages that can collect information on certain topics. We will also use various other programmes, including search engines, for (gathering) information,” he said. 
 

He did not divulge more information on the working of the lab citing security reasons. 
 

Bajaj said that incidents such as the mass protests in New Delhi after the December 16 gangrape caught the police off guard. He said the administration is now aiming to find out what people were thinking about administration, governance and policing, and what they expected from the government. “If I had known about the numbers, I would have deployed more policemen in the area to better manage the protests,” Bajaj said. 
 

While there is logic for the administration to believe that the protests could have been better ‘managed’, or responded to, if the police knew about the numbers beforehand, opening a social media lab to go through Facebook, Twitter and other online content without proper safeguards for data protection and privacy may raise questions.
 

“The issue of procedural safeguards is an important one,” said Chinmayi Arun, assistant professor at the National Law University, Delhi. She said if a lot of information is at the disposal of the Mumbai police in the lab, it may  be misused. “What happens if someone uses access to this information for personal purposes or nefarious purposes? Do we have any safeguards in place against that?” Arun asked. 
 

Mumbai police is yet to consult people or inform them how the department would go about working in a lab like that. There is no information in the public domain about safeguards taken to protect information and privacy of citizens in such a lab. An average Mumbaikar does not know what is happening in the lab. 
 

Of course what he does not know he cannot complain against, but is this ignorance a matter of bliss?
 

And it is not just Mumbai police; a quick check with its Delhi counterpart revealed that it has been doing the same thing for the last five years. 

“We have two cells — the cyber cell, which looks into the criminal issues relating to IT Act, and the special branch that looks into social media (and other online content) and lets us know if there is a need for deployment of extra force,” said Dharmendra Kumar, special commissioner of police (law and order).

Ironically, Kumar denied that the Delhi gangrape protests were not properly responded to due to lack of information about the number of protesters. “People took less than an hour there to collect (assemble), which took us by surprise,” he said. He maintained that social media wasn’t responsible for the turnout of such a large number of people. 
 

Increased monitoring and surveillance in everyday life might now be an accepted mode of living, but it is surely going to make people more careful about how they interact on the internet, defeating the very purpose of the space.