Draft DPDP skips ‘Right to Privacy’ in preamble, govt gets unrestrained powers: CUTS

The draft Digital Personal Data Protection bill has skipped “Right to Privacy” in the preamble and provides unrestrained powers to the government, advocacy group CUTS International has claimed. CUTS said that the draft weakens the regulatory, supervisory, and enforcement architecture by replacing the previously proposed data protection regulator with a board that will be directly in control of the government.

“Moving away from its previous version, the bill skips mention of the fundamental right to privacy in its preamble and narrows the scope of the law from data protection to digital personal data protection excluding non-personal data, which is rather desirable. In doing so, the bill takes away the categorisation of personal data, especially sensitive personal data, thereby painting all personal data with the same regulatory brush,” CUTS said in a statement.