The Digital Personal Data Protection Bill (DPDP) 2023 was introduced in Lok Sabha on August 3, 2023. The Bill seeks to provide for the protection of personal data and the privacy of individuals.
The idea behind the DPDP bill is, Digital platforms will need to take unconditional, free, specific and informed consent from users for processing their data. The “data principal” shall have the right to access information about personal data for which consent has been previously given.
The bill emphasised on how personal data can be collected, processed, safeguarded and prescribing penalties upto ₹250 crore in case of breaches. The bill contains wide-ranging exemptions to the government and has provisions for setting up of a regulator — the Data Protection Board which will be appointed by the government.
In a relief to the industry, the Bill has allowed cross-border data transfers, voluntary undertaking of data breaches and removed criminal penalties prescribed in the earlier draft. Personal data can be transferred to any country except certain geographies that the government may include in a blacklist.
The central government, under the 2023 Bill, will have the power to block public access to any information hosted on a computer source as long as it is in the public interest. No such provision existed in the 2022 version. The Data Protection Board, constituted under the Act, will have advisory power to make recommendations for blocking public access to a computer resource or a platform.
The Board can make such a recommendation if the data fiduciary has faced monetary fine on more than two instances. This provision further solidifies the state's blocking powers, as recognised by the Karnataka High Court in the Twitter case.
Additionally, the new Bill also removes the public interest grounds for which data was deemed to be given, such as prevention or detection of fraud, network and information security, processing of publicly available data, etc.
According to experts, this provision is an attempt to weaken the authority of the Data Protection Board, and thus, curtailing citizens’ control over their personal data, and also making it prone to misuse to target individuals, groups, and communities. They further observed that the provision may be used to clip the wings of the Right To Information (RTI) Act, thereby weakening it.
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