By Viswanathan Srinivasan
India is generating more data than ever before. Thanks to initiatives by the government to digitize the economy, India is on the verge of a data explosion. Nandan Nilekani, former Aadhaar chairman, believes India will be data rich before being economically rich.
Despite this, at a point in time when the developed economies are debating and arguing over certain nuances of data privacy, India doesnt even have a dedicated legislative framework that pertains to this issue. A nine-member committee appointed by the government of India delved deep to understand whether privacy is a basic right for citizens or not, and concluded last week that right to privacy is a fundamental right of every Indian. The need for exponential improvement in the area of data privacy has become so palpable that if India will need to make advancements in the right direction now or pay a hefty fine in the future.
Global precedent
Looking at the developments in other economies, a seamless data privacy law for India appears far from reality. Data privacy laws which had stayed static without any amendments in recent years are now getting revised almost globally. The UK government has updated its existing Data Protection Act to award people more control over their data; the Government of Singapore has made changes to its Personal Data Protection Act to include practical difficulties for organizations in getting the consent of people.
The Government of Singapore has said that it is absolutely legitimate to use the data generated by customers without their permission in case the company could not reach out to them for consent. In this case, the companies are free to use or share the customers data with any other organization if there is no adverse effect on the customer. Though this kind of approach helps an economy by providing constructive feedbacks and decision-making capabilities, it can be extremely dangerous, putting peoples sensitive data at stake. The validity of this approach solely depends on the exhaustiveness of the bill, clarifying what deserves a legal action and what does not.
A difficult process
The process of identifying private information from a common pool of data is going to take a lot of time and money, and will only get more complex and difficult in future due to the varied forms of data sources that are emerging. Every technological innovation uses and captures data that have different dimensions and aspects stuck to it. It has become imperative for law makers to look into the functioning of these business models before drafting the rules for them.
Every sector and every business model generate a different set of data. Designing a law to accommodate various functionalities of different businesses would lead to confusions and reworks. It would be a prudent step by India to follow the footsteps of America and draft data protection bills that are classified based on industries. In this way, law makers should leverage the fact that India is in the initial stages of creating a sovereign data protection law.
Successfully redefining privacy?
Creating a foolproof data privacy law is not only about protecting the privacy of citizens but also about providing a fair treatment to the for-profit organizations. Under the new regulation in the UK, basic identifiers for many online applicationssuch as the IP address and the location datahave also become private information. If such conditions arise in India, because of the already unregulated environment, chaos is going to be much deeper.
The challenges in creating a robust data protection law in a dynamic era like ours are numerous. It is also evident from the recent developments that the world is learning quickly to cope up with the changes. The onus now is on India to create and, very importantly, to amend the laws as frequently as possible. The key to success lies in the sensitivity of the created law to the changes in the technological world and not in the creation of the law itself.
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