In this scenario, imagine living in a house that is guarded by a gatekeeper. This gatekeeper monitors your movements and sells information about you to outside vendors who use it to influence your decisions and sell products to you. When you find out about this collusion, you report it to the property-management team who moves you to a walled garden. In this new environment, you are accompanied everywhere by a protector who strictly limits your access to the outside world. Although you have absolute privacy, your freedom of choice is severely limited.
The proposed Digital Personal Data Protection Bill, 2022 is aimed at addressing the issue of privacy, which is a major concern in India. The latest draft of the bill, released on November 18, 2022 by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, includes strong protections for the processing of digital personal data. It recognizes an individual’s right to protect their personal information and allows for the processing of such data for law enforcement purposes.
The Digital Personal Data Protection Bill, 2022 has three main objectives. Firstly, it seeks to counter the influence of US-based tech giants like Google, Meta, Amazon, and Apple, which have dominance over commercial, civil, political, and press freedoms. Second, it aims to oversee India’s growing digital governance footprint, including the Information Technology Act, 2000, and the IT Amendment Rules, 2022. Finally, the bill is intended to ensure that the exponential growth in citizen-generated data is not appropriated by third parties.
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Although the Digital Personal Data Protection Bill, 2022 has been created to protect citizens’ personal information, it runs the risk of limiting freedom of choice and autonomy for users. This is because it may enable large Indian corporations to create their walled gardens, which would block direct access to third-party data for smaller players, including independent publishers. This would limit individuals’ freedom of choice with respect to privacy.
It is important to understand that the internet depends on advertising for revenue, and targeted advertising requires data. While there is a strong case for a legal framework to prevent citizens’ personal information from being harvested and exploited by foreign corporations, the Digital Personal Data Protection Bill, 2022 must also balance the freedom of the market and the autonomy of users.
