India Scraps Data Privacy Bill

“It’s not about getting a perfect law, but a law at this point,” said Apar Gupta, the executive director of the Internet Freedom Foundation, a digital rights group based in New Delhi. “Each day lost causes more injury and harm.”

The government’s explanation for withdrawing the bill was that it had grown too complicated in the time that a panel of lawmakers had been working on it. The committee set by the government “recommended 81 amendments in a bill of 99 sections,” Ashwini Vaishnaw, a minister for information technology, wrote on Twitter. “The bill has been withdrawn and a new bill will be presented for public consultation.”

India, the world’s fastest-growing market for new internet users, has seen an explosion of personal data as millions of new users came online and started using hundreds of free and paid apps that store the data.

The country’s push to better protect its data extends beyond the scope of the data protection bill. For instance, India has required credit card issuers and payment processors to store data on local transactions inside the country.

India has resisted the arguments of financial companies that say that setting up local data processing increased costs significantly and could set a precedent for other countries to do the same, as well as potentially affect their fraud monitoring.

In addition to its demand to store data locally, the country’s central bank last year ordered all companies to purge debit and credit card details beginning in 2022 to protect customers from being charged against their will.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/04/business/india-data-privacy.html