The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) released the draft of a new comprehensive data protection bill on Friday, three months after withdrawing a previous bill that had alarmed big technology companies.
The new measure, now up for public consultation till December 17, is expected to be presented in the next session of parliament but seems unlikely given the deadline.
CNBC-TV18 was joined by former telecom Secretary R Chandrashekhar, Gopal Jain, Senior Advocate, Supreme Court and Apar Gupta, Executive Director at Internet Freedom Foundation to discuss the Digital Personal Data Protection Bill, 2022.
The experts talked about how the revised draft is a better version of its predecessor by protecting the right to privacy of an individual while also encouraging innovation, which was a concern in the last proposed draft.
Gopal Jain, Senior Advocate, Supreme Court, said that the hallmark of the draft bill is simplicity and clarity. “The views of all stakeholders have been taken on board and that's a very important aspect in improving the quality of lawmaking,” he added.
Apar Gupta, Executive Director, Internet Freedom Foundation expressed his concern about the implementation of the bill, which has also proposed setting up a Data Protection Board of India. The terms and conditions of appointment of the chairperson and board and members of the board will be as may be prescribed by the Central government.
“Essentially, it may be that the members of this body which enforces the law against the government and its entities itself may not have that autonomy and independence or may not have those service conditions which may actually result in translating the protections within this law to actual practice,” he went on to say.
He also mentioned that the phrase “as may be prescribed” has been used 18 times in the proposal.
Former telecom Secretary R Chandrashekhar, inclining to what Jain said, agreed that the bill’s objective was to be clear and was a huge improvement over the previous version which had “tied itself in knots by trying to cover too many things”.
“There were also some idealistic but somewhat troublesome provisions in the earlier draft, like the right to be forgotten, which has now been replaced by a much simpler right to withdraw consent which in turn requires the data fiduciary to stop using that data and so on. Similarly, the powers to grant to exempt government agencies have been made much less sweeping and I think that was a cause for a lot of concern for many people. And another I think significant step has been the compliance burden in terms of the appointment of a number of officials at different levels,” he added.
The draft itself states that “Every request for consent under the provisions of this Act shall be presented to the Data Principal in a clear and plain language”. The phrase “clear and plain language” has been used at least three times in the draft.
The Data Fiduciaries have also been asked to give the Data Principal the option to access the information in the preferred language of the former for better understanding.
Also Read: Data protection bill will penalise platforms for customer data misuse: Rajeev Chandrasekhar
First Published: Nov 18, 2022 7:01 PM IST
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