New law on data protection in the offing

The Electronic Transactions Law deals with the protection of private data. Although it is aimed specifically at e-commerce, it does provide certain safeguards and criminal sanctions against the illegal use of personal information.

The Cyber Crimes Law covers violations of safety, confidentiality of data and systems.

Some of the penalties for hacking crimes are increased if they involve the misuse of personal data.

Government entities, businesses and civil society organisations now carry many of their activities on the Internet.

Many of these activities involve collecting, processing and using personal date of the users of these services.

Also for a majority of the organisations in Oman, data is collected and used for legitimate reasons such as carrying out the services required by users or for regularly communicating with them.

However, it is not difficult to see how individuals could suffer if their data is misused or released without permission, say experts.

The ITA has established ‘awareness’ programmes recently in coordination with other relevant agencies to stop specific cyber-crimes like extortionmail.

As part of the campaign, the regulator had issued an order asking all agencies to develop awareness programmes for their employees.

These were required to focus on security policies and standards which the ITA had issued, including the framework of security designs for government networks and the security designs framework for applications and services of e-government.