What was the Personal Data Protection Bill & Its Major Challenges? UPSC Daily Important Topic | 8 August 2022

✓The Personal Data Protection Bill, 2019 was introduced in Lok Sabha by the Minister of Electronics and Information Technology, on December 11, 2019.

✓Commonly referred to as the “Privacy Bill”, it intended to protect individual rights by regulating the collection, movement, and processing of data that is personal, or which can identify the individual.

Challenges:

✓Many contend that the physical location of the data is not relevant in the cyber world as the encryption keys may still be out of reach of national agencies.

✓National security or reasonable purposes are open-ended and subjective terms, which may lead to intrusion of the state into the private lives of citizens.

✓Technology giants like Facebook and Google are against it and have criticised the protectionist policy of data localisation as they are afraid it would have a domino effect in other countries as well.

✓It had been opposed by social media firms, experts and even ministers, who said that it had too many loopholes to be effective and beneficial for both users and companies.

✓Also, it may backfire on India’s own young startups that are attempting global growth, or on larger firms that process foreign data in India.