Data
Protection Minus Data Residency
India needs laws on privacy and data
protection. The chances of data breaches taking place from some node with lax
security or the other of an interconnected mesh of nodes are growing by the day.
And once a person's biometrics have been compromised, they cannot be reissued
like passwords. Intelligent policy formulation, after public debate involving
all stakeholders, and enforcement of norms brook no delay.
Some
technological fixes are on the horizon, with blockchains, the technology
underlying bitcoins, promising the possibility of individual control over some
crucial data. Even so, India will need both national legislation and binding
agreements with other nations, to make optimal use of data. There is a growing
cry to legislate data residency, the requirement that data on Indians should
necessarily reside within India.
While
it is vital to protect personal data, it is futile to imagine that mere
location of servers in a particular geography will ta ke the data stored on
them beyond external scrutiny. What is more germane is to formulate intelligent
and enforceable domestic data protection rules and allow data portability only
to other jurisdictions that offer similar protection and guarantees of
protection to the data of Indians as well. The EU seeks to harmonise data
protection laws across its member states precisely to allow cross-border data
mobility without loss of data integrity.
Data portability is vital for two
reasons. India has
the potential to process much of the world's data and cannot afford to be
locked out of this opportunity because of its own restrictive policies on data mobility.
Further, advances in artificial intelligence depend on access to all kinds of
data, from which algorithms learn. India needs wide debate on global best
practices in data protection, leading to firm policy.
Source | Economic Times | 4 August
2017
Regards
Pralhad
Jadhav
Senior Manager @
Knowledge Repository
Khaitan
& Co
Upcoming Lecture | ACTREC - BOSLA Annual lecture series (125th birth anniversary of father of library
science, Padmashree Dr. S. R. Ranganathan) on Saturday, 12th August 2017 at Advanced Centre for Treatment,
Research and Education in Cancer (ACTREC), Kharghar, Navi Mumbai. (Theme | 'MakerSpace')
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