‘As end users we will have some peace of mind’

Siddharth Devnani, the co-founder of SoCheers InfoTech, an Indian marketing and advertising company, shares his insights on the newly proposed data protection laws.

QWhy is India looking at data privacy laws? A The objective looks two-fold. One is where the regulators can have access to data – and local companies will have to oblige when they demand for this. The other is to prevent storage of private data of Indian citizens in other countries without their explicit consent. There is also the angle of preventing misuse of user data.

What implications will this have for businesses? A lot of companies, especially multinational corporations, would have to shift their data to India, which may need changing their technical architecture and internal processes. This will further impact their operating costs.

What about the users? As end users, we will have some peace of mind, knowing that our data is unlikely to reach the hands of foreign regulators. On the flip side, it also gives an easy direct access of our data to local regulators – which is really the point of all this.

Could this create fears about how user data might be accessed? Smarter users are likely to get paranoid – owing to our country’s track record on data security and attitude towards privacy.

What are the potential challenges?

Where AI is powering much of our digital lives today – from which posts you see on Instagram, to which credit card transactions are marked as fraud, to what jokes Siri or Amazon’s Alexa deliver on demand – it is based on the huge chunk of data the tech companies gather. Fragmenting this country-wise will hamper the “learning” ability of AI to some extent. That is if these MNCs are not allowed to send copies of Indian users’ data.