The revised consultation paper of the Indian Data Protection and Privacy act is out and indicates the tough stance of regulatory bodies to protect end-user information. Being the second largest Internet user with more than 750 million active smartphones in usages; India is viewed as an open ground for companies to test the Technology, Applications, Products, and Service usages adoption without any accountability.
The European Union regulators released General Data Protection Regulation and mapped it with the Digital marketing act to protect their citizens. Interestingly the regulators fined thousands of companies for non-compliance, and violation of the privacy act and won the confidence of citizens that their personal information will be protected in any circumstance.
I love the approach of European Union regulatory bodies for their stringent action against leading companies like Instagram, Google, Facebook, WhatsApp, and others for violating privacy and protection law
The unprecedented growth of the internet, smartphones, mobility applications (consumer & Enterprise), and game adoption without any defined policies on data acquisition, processing, storage, and transfer impacted citizens dearly.
Indian citizens are experiencing the crude reality of
Unwarranted blind marketing calls
Financial fraud
Increased marketing messaging and fraud
Cross Selling of Citizens’ personal information
Growing phishing mail & attack
Increased spamming
Growing hacking
Social Media Identity frauds
The competitive environment of acquiring consumers or prosumers attracted even public sector entities to outsource the services to companies using unethical business practices to acquire citizens’ or targeted users’ personal information.
The released bill has intrinsic clauses to protect the citizen’s personal information provided the violators don’t get the chance to use the democratic legal process to delay the penalty recognition. Being a user or citizen, you will have the right to ask the marketing company to delete your personal information from their database. In case of marketing companies fails to remove the same then you can escalate it to regulatory bodies for further action and protection of your privacy.
It’s time for Indian regulators to enforce the potential law with time-bound action on the violators to protect not only the citizen’s personal information but to protect the critical national infrastructure from growing digital security threats or hacking.
India must come up with its final draft bill to Parliament and convert it into Law with no further delay. In my opinion, India should initiate a citizen awareness program regarding their rights and the process to bring them to the authority’s notice.
