Data protection bill: Decoding the penalty clause

This, by far, defeats the key principle of being citizen-oriented toward data protection as the government would like to decide on “sensitive data” and wheth-er it should be stored or discarded. The construction of PDPB and the recommendations from the joint parliamen-tary committee suggest that effectively regulating “data” and, thereby, regulating “privacy” is the government’s job and cannot be left to data controllers.

This leads to an important question: Would the govern-ment have the capacity to handle requests on a minute-to-minute basis from the data controllers?

This arrangement also puts the data principal in a risk zone. While the data principal may think that certain data may be classified, the queuing at the government’s IT desk may jeopardise the benefit of the doubt to the data principal, hence making them susceptible to unauthorised data access by third parties. Second, such legislation, rather than safe-guarding the citizen, operates in a mechanism where the government has a transparent film to look at what is being entered in the data owner’s device as this information would be shared with the government until the issue of what pri-vate data is, effectively settled.

Last, this creates an arduous amount of burden on any company, which by any form or means is collecting data from a data owner to transition the compliance with the stan-dards set out. While the transition is an overhaul, a step-by-step approach toward this transition would be worthwhile.

India has over a billion smartphones and thousands of applications that use and collect data. Therefore, all the companies must transition to the new norms immediately and provide opt-in or opt-out for the user. This effectively means that consumers or the data owners must decide to opt in or opt out about the data they intend to share with the application. The scenario is fatal for a user, who may share the data for quicker access but may realise the folly after the consequential effect. This is one piece of legislation that In-dia should get right by all means, lest we legalise snooping and profiling by the government.