With The Score Keeper comic strip, we set out to explore more engaging and accessible modes of facilitating public engagement on digital privacy. Our goal was to create a format that could reach a much wider audience, especially those who are not academic specialists or policy makers, and to communicate the stakes of privacy in a way that feels relatable and urgent.

The comic imagines what a citizenship score system might look like in India’s digital welfare state—a system where entitlements and benefits are closely tied to the collection and use of personal data. It draws on familiar realities: the growing integration of state services and technology, the quiet accumulation of personal information, and the subtle ways in which these processes can reshape our freedoms.

As our panellists observed, privacy is often seen as a matter of “big” decisions. In practice, however, it is the countless small, routine exchanges of data—made without much thought—that compound into something far more powerful and potentially harmful. By telling this story through characters and narrative rather than legal or technical language, The Score Keeper invites readers to see how those seemingly minor choices add up.

Read the Comic here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1GQooF8wyIySxUAETKH9GMCvdBxC6FYYe/view?usp=sharing