Why Non-Personal, What’s Critical … & Snooping?

News: Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC)  on the Personal Data Protection (PDP) Bill, 2019 has submitted its report in the Parliament.

What are the key recommendations of JPC?

First, It suggested renaming ‘Data Protection Bill’ by dropping the word ‘personal’.

Second, Committee recommended that the same regulator should govern both personal data (data about an individual) and non-personal data (anonymised data, business data).

Third, It suggested that government should set up certification labs for testing the integrity of all digital and IoT devices.

Fourth, Another suggestion is to store the sensitive and critical personal data in India only, as proposed in the 2019 bill.

Last, The committee suggested to did away with the penalty provision proposed in the 2019 bill.

What is non-personal data? Why is its inclusion worrying?

Non Personal data is not about any particular individual. For eg, data about traffic or congested routes picked up by a ride-share platform. Or data about soil trends or weather patterns that never relate to any person is considered as non-personal data.

The government argues that this data is useful for formulating any future policy, but businessman argues that such data is proprietary.

What are the concerns associated?

How the Data Protection Bill is effective in the current scenario?

– It has the potential to address long-standing concerns around our surveillance regime.

-Having strong checks and balances over government surveillance could also help India seek free flows of data from regions like Europe that restrict transfers to other countries unless they have sufficient protections.

Source: This post is based on the article ” Why Non-Personal, What’s Critical … & Snooping?” published in the Times of India on 26th November 2021.