Dinesh Kamath's Editorial 'Individual privacy and data needs to be protected' that was published in Newsband

Individual privacy and data needs to be protected

Justice BN Srikrishna had come up with the white paper on data protection. Today individuals, machines, financial establishments, enterprises and government agencies are being connected on a single network, Hence there is a need to focus on protection of data

The US, China and the EU have put in place laws to address concerns around privacy and data protection, India has so far taken a piecemeal approach. There has been no attempt by policymakers until now to put in place a robust data-protection law. Consumers are constantly exposed to hackers and cyber threats. Our lack of preparedness to deal with such threats is something to be worried about.  

There has to be a huge penalty on those who misuse or violate principles of privacy and data protection. There is also a need for a national awareness campaign in this regard. The right to privacy has led to state making effort to link multiple identification numbers and welfare programmes with the nation’s controversial biometric programme, Aadhaar.

But not a day goes by without messages from banks and telecom companies asking customers to link Aadhaar with bank accounts and cell numbers, respectively. But amidst all the bustle, what are Aadhaar’s realistic chances of survival?

Justice Chandrachud came up with the verdict to facilitate data mining and open data platforms for good governance. On this point, the Government turned to the Aadhaar Act 2016 for its support. But the data leakages ails Aadhaar. The personnel in charge of our data have little training and less interest in keeping such authentication records confidential.

As the custodian of data, it decides the level of access to Aadhaar data needed for purposes of authentication and the authentication agencies contracted to do so. But how to deal with data breaches? We have a body that has minimal incentive to report or act upon data breaches. Any breach is, plainly put, a challenge to its authority.

There is need to prevent the diversion of scarce public resources to undeserving impostors. This has, in some ways, been the central justification for relying on biometric data for identification and authentication purposes, and without which none of the privacy worries may have arisen in the first place.