Some error occured while loading the Quick View. Please close the Quick View and try reloading the page.
Available open access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.
Today, privacy is more than a personal choice—it’s a terrain shaped by power, politics and everyday life.
This book shifts the lens from established western narratives to India, WhatsApp’s largest market, exploring how digital privacy is lived, built, and regulated on the world’s digital peripheries. Drawing on rich field-based research, it examines encrypted technologies, the ties between big tech and governments, and the role of messaging apps in political life.
This is a sharp and grounded account of how privacy can both strengthen and erode democracy in the digital age.
‘A sharp and timely intervention, this book reveals how planetary-scale privacy infrastructures like WhatsApp’s encryption produce new frictions in public-private life, sovereignty and lived democracy in India.’ Payal Arora, Utrecht University
‘Rather than providing another dry, legal, regulatory and normative analysis of privacy in the digital age, Williams and Kamra provide a lucid and compelling account of the shifting corporate imaginaries and machinations of Big Tech and the everyday lived experiences of users navigating privacy. Empirically rich and theoretically sophisticated, this is a vital read for anyone interested understanding the ongoing, contested production of privacy.’ Rob Kitchin, Maynooth University
‘This book offers an unsettling portrait of our digital lives, where the desire for connection via messaging apps meets the reality of everyday surveillance. It is a compelling and timely book that challenges us to imagine what it truly means to live a digital life with dignity in the age of techno-feudalism.’ Nicole Curato, University of Birmingham
‘This account of WhatsApp stretches all the way from the geopolitics of platforms to everyday life. With this rich panorama, Williams and Kamra provide us with the most penetrating analysis of the role of the internet in India to date.’ Ralph Schroeder, University of Oxford
‘Using an innovative, nuanced framework, Williams and Kamra present a multiscalar story of WhatsApp in the world’s most populous country. This is essential reading for anyone interested in the political and social sides to digital technologies and how people relate to them.’ Preeti Raghunath, University of Sheffield
‘A groundbreaking and urgent intervention into how we understand digital privacy in the Global South. Pushing critical data studies in bold new directions, this is essential reading for anyone interested in platform governance, postcolonial digitality and the futures of democracy.’ Paromita Pain, University of Nevada, Reno
Philippa Williams is Professor of Geography at Queen Mary University of London.
Lipika Kamra is Assistant Professor of Politics at the University of Birmingham.
1. ‘The Future Is Private’
2. WhatsApp? Why India?
3. Privacy Techtonics
4. The Politics of Digital Private Messaging
5. Privacy and the Law
6. Privacy-by-design
7. Privacy Is (Geo)political
8. WhatsApp (in) Business
9. Conclusion