The ministry of electronics and information technology (MeitY) has extended the deadline to submit comments on the Digital Personal Data Protection Bill, 2022 to January 2 following requests from various stakeholders. The deadline for submission of comments was December 17.
The government had released the draft of the new data protection bill last month, after withdrawing it in August. The revamped version of the bill details the rights and duties of the citizen for personal data protection and the provisions to use collected data lawfully by the data fiduciary, ie, a company dealing with the individual data.
According to experts, the provision in the bill related to data storage in trusted geographies to be prescribed by the government is positive for big tech firms which would no longer need to store citizens personal data in the country.
For data breaches, the quantum of maximum penalty is now proposed at Rs 500 crore, compared to older version of the bill which proposed to levy penalties of 2-4% of total worldwide turnover of the firms concerned.
“This Bill will create a significant behavioural change amongst those who collect data because this Bill has for the first time a section called obligations of a data fiduciary,” minister of state for electronics and information technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar told FE recently. “That is why we have said, data minimisation, purpose limitation, and storage limitation. Data minimisation means you can only collect what is absolutely minimum required. Purpose limitation means you can only use it for the purpose for which you have acquired the data. And storage limitations is that after you have delivered the service, you have to delete the data,” he said.
However, many experts have expressed concerns about the age clause in the bill, which makes it mandatory for data fiduciary to take parental consent to process personal data of a child below 18 years of age. Further, no clarity on categorisation of significant data fiduciaries, legal framework of cross-border data transfers, framework of data protection board, are some of the areas which the experts want the government to specify clearly.
The government aims to present the bill in the parliament during the upcoming Budget session.