A book about data and privacy for Indian readers. Not a textbook — a book that uses Indian systems and metaphors, dabbawalas, UPI, the census, to make digital infrastructure legible to the people living inside it.
Every time you tap, scroll, pay, or search, you leave behind fragments of yourself. Those
fragments assemble into a surprisingly coherent digital double — your datafolk — that lives
inside databases and algorithms and moves through systems you rarely see.
DataFolks follows that double through its whole life, and each chapter makes one invisible
system visible using Indian infrastructure and Indian metaphors — dabbawalas, UPI, the census,
Aadhaar. DataFolks originated as a proposal for the India Science Book Fellowship (ISBF), and
has grown into an interactive book with embeds, diagrams, and live experiments.
What’s inside
The book moves in four parts, following your datafolk from cradle to defence:
- Birth — how data about you is collected and a digital self is first assembled.
- Movement — how that self travels: packets, networks, and the couriers of the internet.
- The marketplace — how it is profiled, priced, and traded by the ad-tech economy.
- Defence — how encryption, law, and your own choices protect it.
All eight chapters are live to read now as an early preview, while the full book goes through
an editorial pass ahead of publication.
