Seems India’s winter parliament session is sending heat waves across the country!
Exactly a day before, we saw the controversial Citizenship Amendment Bill getting passed after an intense debate.
Now, another important bill that closely relates to citizens is coming up, i.e. the public ‘Personal Data Protection Bill’.
Unveiled a year ago, the updated Bill has draft laws to be presented in the Parliament on December 11, 2019. And, the Union Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad will table it.
The Personal Data Protection 2019 now seeks companies to submit all the anonymized personal and non-personal data of citizens to the government.
While taking over the control on one side, the government is indirectly emphasizing on how companies handle citizen data.
The Bill requires companies to seek public consent to store their data and also gives citizens the power to get changes or deletions made to their data anytime.
The Bill also mandates companies to consider kid’s age and seek parent’s consent while collecting children personal data.
On the social media front, it seeks citizens to voluntarily prove their identity of their social media accounts and get a visible verification mark upon successful completion.
In a move supporting foreign companies, the Bill says any data is transferable outside India as long as it continues to reside in India.
With this updated bill, the Indian Government is also proposing a new Data Protection Authority (DPA) to ensure proper implementation of good data protection practices and compliance.
While the original draft of the Bill had DPA deciding committee comprised of people from executive, judicial and external expertise, the updated draft involves only executive-level.
The original draft Bill allowed all other types of data for transfer to other locations with copies in Indian servers, while limiting the critical data to India.
“Critically, this latest Bill is a dramatic step backward in terms of the exceptions it grants for government processing and surveillance,” says Jochai Ben-Avie, Head of International Public Policy, Mozilla.
View More:-
