A couple of months ago, my friend Angad Chowdhry (@angadc) 'lost' his brother Kabir out in the Lahaul-Spiti Valley. By 'lost' I mean, that the young man had neither died nor gone rogue, but was incommunicado for a few days. Angad, as a concerned elder brother, put out a message (actually several) on Twitter asking for help to locate Kabir, which many of us, his friends, faithfully retweeted. Within two hours, I kid you not, in the middle of the high Himalayas, Kabir Chowdhry was told that his family was worried about him and the sheepish young man called back home. I remember speaking to Angad afterwards and despite the fact that he holds a doctorate in anthropology from SOAS, he was amazed at human behaviour on online social media.
Which is why, the events of the past day on twitter in
Mumbai and Delhi have not really surprised me. I do not know how effective the #here2help hashtag has been for people needing to find shelter, because while traumatic, the events of the past two days - the bombs and the floods are nowhere near as devastating as the 26th July floods, the train bombs or the events of November 2008 which upended life in the city. That said, I was rather surprised that friends on Twitter such as Ravina Rawal (@ravinarawal) began claiming that people managed to get rides home thanks to the hashtag.
But while Mumbaikars have in the past relied on the help of strangers, I was just wondering that such a large treasure trove of verified email addresses and phone numbers will be a spam marketers dream. And while the people who put them up have great intentions, after using the internet for over 15 years, I can assure you that not everything on the internet is what it seems to be.
I know that Indians are far more permissive of invasions of their mobile and online privacy, but after the events are over, the data is best shredded. Even though, I'm afraid I believe it has been mirrored all over the place. Thank god for email spam filters then.
I'm not being cynical, and would like to believe that sharing phone numbers and contacts on Twitter, mainly for blood donation drives, can save lives. All I am saying is that online users should be careful with their data, too.
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