Answer of the day-Data Protection

Q- Government has appointed a committee under S N Krishna to recommend for provisions of data protection bill. What is the need for data protection? What should be the provision of such bill according to you? (12.5)

Sol- With the increase in digital data of citizens, businesses and government and further push in that direction due to increase in Internet access, government Programme like Ditigal India etc, data protection is and will be a crucial need of the time. 

    It is in this backdrop that government has appointed S N Krishna Committee for the data protection bill. Various need for data protection are

Increasing data

1.Internet access has been increasing at the rate of

2.Use of Internet by people

3. Increasing push of businesses to move over INTERNET,

4.Programme like Digital India, NOFN(national optical Fibre network), e-governance etc 

Increasing vulnerability 

1.Cyber attack, Cyber Bulling

2.Use by corporates for the achievement of their profit at the cost of privacy of consumer 

3.Cyber attack like stuxnet as part of cyber war

4.Threat of terrorist making cyber attack 

5.Government Programme like Aadhaar, just making critical citizen data as vulnerable.

Therefor both increasing data as well as increasing vulnerability make it necessary to have date protection regime

Provision for data protection law should be as follows 

1.Adopting A. P Shah committee recommendation in the form of choice to people, limited data collection, limited use of data, access to data by users, choice to delete data etc

2.Making more robust digital infrastructure which would protect attack by outsider. 

3.Restricting access to data by government, which would require permission of high authority. Thus restricting it's misuse

4.Mandatory security features on mobile phone

5.Restrciting access to Chinese mobile to critical government infrastructure like defence

6.Creating awareness among people for the need of data protection 

7.Building Capacity in the country with skilled people and research in Data Protection 

8.Incouraging set up Internet server in the country. Thus making us less vulnerable to foreign country influence.