Data Protection Laws in India: What is the Purpose?

Data Protection Laws in India: What is the Purpose?
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Here is everything you need to know about data protection laws in India.

Employee records, customer data, loyalty programs, transactions, and data collecting are all examples of key pieces of information that organizations routinely keep. Data protection regulations safeguard personal information from being exploited for fraudulent purposes, such as phishing scams and identity theft. Now, let's learn more about the purpose of data protection laws in our country.

What is Data Protection Laws?

Data protection represents a set of privacy laws, rules, and processes aimed at limiting the amount of personal data collected, stored, and disseminated that intrudes on one's privacy. Personal data is information or data on an individual who can be identified from such information or data, regardless of whether it is gathered by the government or by a private organization or agency.

The Rules exclusively cover the protection of "important personal information of a person," which includes private data that contains information about:

  • Passwords
  • Financial details, such as bank statement, debit card, cash card or other payment device information
  • Condition of physical, physiological, and mental health
  • Sexual orientation
  • Medical records and history
  • Biometric information.

Purpose of Data Protection Laws in India

Need for Single-statute Legislation

The major causes for the significant undervaluation of data breaches have been regulatory uncertainty and inactivity. Only when these fundamental causes have been addressed can the lack of understanding of the relevance and effect of personal data be brought into question.

In the utter lack of single statute legislation for data law in India, numerous sector-specific regulations and other laws have provided suitable remedies and precautionary mechanisms, such as the Information Technology Act, 2000 ("Act") and implementing regulations formulated underact, Indian Telegraph Act, 1885, Payment and Settlement Systems Act, 2007 and SEBI Data Sharing the PDP Bill is required by such a disjointed collection of rules and ambiguous redress processes.

International Law Commitment 

The state must strive to "promote respect for international law and treaty commitments in the interactions of organized persons with one another," according to Article 51 of India's Constitution, which is part of the Directive Principles of State Policy.

The ICCPR refers to a fundamental human right in the Protection of Human Rights Act of 1993, while the latter makes it necessary for states to make efforts to realize such rights and provide protection against private parties' intervention.

Meeting Internationally Accepted Standards

In this information era, it is unavoidable for India to establish solid and timeless legislation that can demonstrate compliance while allowing data to be transferred from other countries. Such legislation is necessary for receiving smooth data transfers, particularly from the EU and the United Kingdom, which are emerging as worldwide leaders in privacy law and data protection.

As a result, it is critical for India to establish a clear set of regulations to ensure lawful cross-border data transfers and to provide the same degree of data security to residents of India and other nations.

Boosting Domestic Digital Economy

The right of a state to control its network in order to serve its economic interests, the most essential of which are safety, privacy, and trade, is known as digital sovereignty. The necessity to provide data in India to a local home arises from the fact that India is a sovereign nation, and as such, the data created by its inhabitants is seen as a national asset. According to India's security and strategic objectives, such a national resource may be necessary to be housed and guarded within national borders.

Preventing Privacy Harms

Individuals and businesses that process personal data have apparent bargaining power imbalances, and it is critical to reducing the damages that result from this imbalance.

Solove has also worked with the aggregation problem, which comes from the fusing of little pieces of seemingly unimportant data. In the face of such dangers, it is critical to creating a framework that lodges the rights of a data principal in a human who provides personal data and so becomes the digital economy's central actor.

Need for Facilitating Data Ownership

According to Cambridge Analytica's conclusions, data subjects were unaware that their Facebook usage would be pooled with 3rd parties for targeted advertising around the US elections. 12 Data collection techniques are typically opaque, taking on complicated privacy forms over which consumers have little influence.

Artificial intelligence systems that provide insufficient data on data flows frequently exacerbate the connection between data principals and fiduciaries. The state has a significant amount of coercive authority and the collecting and processing of personal data is generally uncontrolled, contributing significantly to the creation of information silos.

Imparting Differential Protection

As previously said, in today's data economy, the separation of data sets into personal data, sensitive personal data, essential personal data, and non-personal data is becoming increasingly important. The analysis of each data collection is likely to have a unique impact, for example, an individual's health data set vs. personal facts such as an individual's name and age. As a result, an increased level of security in terms of cross-border transfer limitations for vital personal data becomes essential.

Prevent Problems of Free Data Flows

Inadequacies in data flow regulation in India are simply the result of a naive assumption that the flow of data is a pure benefit. This type of regulation is necessary to create an orderly digital economy that benefits citizens, governments, and global businesses alike.

Conclusion

To summarise, while each of the aforementioned objectives serves as a foundation for enacting the PDP Bill, the importance of preserving privacy as a basic right and proving readiness to fulfill widely accepted data protection standards in the worldwide community is at the number one spot.

As we anxiously await the monsoon session of Parliament, it is critical to recognize the requirement for a realistic timetable for the implementation and enforcement of such a rule. Until then, the government and business may work together to create capacity and infrastructure, improve data literacy, and get a deeper understanding of technological advancements.

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