Minister of State for Information Technology Rajiv Chandrashekhar said in a tweet on Tuesday that companies misusing user data will face “punitive and financial” consequences once the proposed data protection law comes into force.
Chandrasekhar cited a New York Times news report on Google’s $391.5 million privacy settlement in the US to allegedly mislead users into believing that they have turned off location tracking: “India’s # The DigitalDataProtection Bill will put a stop to this, and ensure that any forum or intermediary who does so will face punitive and financial consequences.” Two industry insiders, requesting anonymity, said the draft (Data Protection) Bill is ready to be released.
Two people who sought anonymity confirmed the development and said the bill should be released in a few days, probably as early as Wednesday. However, there was no official confirmation of the release date.
The government had withdrawn the Personal Data Protection Bill, 2021 in August. The bill was introduced in the Lok Sabha in December 2019. Subsequently, a Joint Parliamentary Committee report of 16 December 2021 tabled in Parliament said that the law should bring both personal and non-personal data under its ambit. However, this proposal was strongly opposed by a section of the industry.
According to the two officials cited above, the updated version of the bill will deal with personal data and leave out non-personal data. Additionally, it will also deal with digital data, that is, data obtained through digital mediums, such as apps and websites, he added.
A senior government official said the data protection bill is expected to come within this week and some relaxations may be given in data localisation, data storage and data processing norms. Also, compliance provisions will be eased, which in turn will help India’s fast-growing startup ecosystem.
The bill is unlikely to regulate equipment or include provisions for testing and certification of hardware, he said, seeking anonymity. Intermediaries currently regulated under the IT intermediary guidelines are also not likely to be included in the draft bill to ensure that there is no regulatory overlap.
Furthermore, the proposed bill will make it easier for companies to comply with the new guidelines on data protection, which is good news for India’s startup ecosystem.
In August, Chandrasekhar during a press briefing emphasized that the compliance burden on startups was one of the reasons for withdrawing the bill.
“Had there been a complex privacy law, the big tech firms would have hired more lawyers to comply. The burden of such a law would hurt startups,” he argued. However, it is not clear how much this will affect the data localization rules proposed in the original version of the bill, where the government has mandated all companies dealing with sensitive data of Indian users. To keep a copy within its limits. Tech firms, including industry leaders, have opposed the localization rules.
“A number of compliance issues were highlighted in the 2021 bill. Data localization was a factor, but not as much for small and medium businesses. This was a major concern for large organizations. For SMEs, the compliance burden was primarily in terms of reporting and data retention – the amount of time mandated to retain a certain amount of customer data or metadata,” said Prashanto K. Roy, technology and policy analyst.
He said the bill would force SMEs to “look at compliance in a way they never did before. It would force them to scramble for technological solutions to comply with data protection law”. was also an issue. Large organizations. Later, non-personal data was also brought in. The biggest issue was the shift of focus from data privacy law to data law. Data protection law was supposed to be a privacy law, but so Not done.”
There is speculation that the data protection bill may be a barebones version of the original draft and may not be as detailed, as the government wants to reserve the overall regulation of the digital ecosystem under India’s jurisdiction for Digital India, a person said. Is. Act, which is also expected to be released in the coming months. An email query to the spokesperson of Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology did not elicit any response till press time.
Abhijit Ahskar contributed to this story.
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