{"id":35873,"date":"2018-11-01T12:05:23","date_gmt":"2018-11-01T06:35:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.forumias.com\/?p=35873"},"modified":"2018-11-01T12:05:23","modified_gmt":"2018-11-01T06:35:23","slug":"panel-to-draft-data-protection-bill-sc-told","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/panel-to-draft-data-protection-bill-sc-told\/","title":{"rendered":"Panel to draft data protection Bill, SC told:\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.thehindu.com\/todays-paper\/panel-to-draft-data-protection-bill-sc-told\/article19405401.ece\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Panel to draft data protection Bill, SC told<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Context<\/b><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 1rem;\">The Central Government criticized for taking conflicting position on whether or not Indian citizen enjoy a fundamental right to privacy under the Constitution.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>The Chronological order <\/b><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In the Aadhaar case, the government has argued against the existence of a fundamental right to privacy despite more than 40 years of jurisprudence developed by the court holding it to be so.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The government has taken the opposite position in the Whatsapp case: Arguing that personal data, and consequently privacy, is an extension of life and personal liberty guaranteed under Article 21 of the Constitution. This is but one in a series of ironies that have punctuated the government\u2019s positions.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Back in 2011, when the Ministry of Law and Justice referred the question of the continuing operation of the Aadhaar project without a law, the opinion was that the right to privacy is a fundamental right under Article 21.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">This position was repeated in the government\u2019s counter-affidavits filed in the Aadhaar petitions before the Supreme Court between 2012 and 2014.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In 2015, the central government began to argue against a fundamental right to privacy. Around the same time, its arguments in the criminal defamation case were grounded on the fundamental right to privacy.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">There, it succeeded in its attempt to save Section 499 of the IPC that provided for defamation as a criminal offence from being struck down as being in violation of the right to free speech.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><b>The arguments over Aadhaar<\/b><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In Aadhaar, the government\u2019s tendency to take self-contradicting positions is not limited to the right to privacy.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">It has been argued for Aadhaar as a project of inclusion on the one hand, even as, on the other hand, all the statistics claimed in support of the project seek to prove exclusion or \u201csavings\u201d.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">It has also been argued that the Aadhaar project has given millions of Indians an identity and made them visible to the state even as it defends its porous verification procedures saying that only 0.03 per cent of the enrollees were without prior identity documents.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Following several incidents of \u201cdata leaks\u201d where government websites were shown to be leaking personal information, including Aadhaar numbers of people, the UIDAI is reported to have played down the dangers of such leaks.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The Act prescribes a punishment of imprisonment up to three years for such supposedly innocuous disclosure.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">It has been argued that basic demographic and biometric data collected by private enrolment agencies is not so sensitive as to have any personal security implications.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">At the same time, UIDAI had been turning down Right to Information (RTI) requests on the sanctity of UIDAI data on a legal exemption that relates to the sovereignty and integrity of India and national security.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">There has been an implied acknowledgement of the danger of storing one\u2019s religion in a database such as Aadhaar\u2019s when the Act included a specific prohibition on that.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The law sanctions the storage of one\u2019s name and fathers\u2019 name which together can be used to determine religion with near certainty.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Such records are by no means in-depth. Some of these inconsistencies are subtle, but others like the government\u2019s position on the fundamental right to privacy are less so.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Even on pure questions of law, one hopes that dispassionate and consistent reason, rather than convenience in the context of a specific case determines its positions before the court. More so when citizens\u2019 fundamental rights are involved.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Panel to draft data protection Bill, SC told:\u00a0 Context The Central Government criticized for taking conflicting position on whether or not Indian citizen enjoy a fundamental right to privacy under the Constitution. The Chronological order In the Aadhaar case, the government has argued against the existence of a fundamental right to privacy despite more than&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/panel-to-draft-data-protection-bill-sc-told\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Panel to draft data protection Bill, SC told:\u00a0<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":61,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[555],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35873","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-test-1","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","views":{"total":0,"cached_at":"","cached_date":1704775404},"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35873","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/61"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35873"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35873\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35873"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35873"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35873"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}