Data protection bill: Big Brother retains escape hatch

The Centre and its vast menagerie of federal agencies have again squirmed out of the clutches of the proposed personal data protection law.

On Friday, information technology minister Ashwini Vaishnaw announced the release of the draft Digital Personal Data Protection Bill 2022 on Twitter and sought views from stakeholders by December 17.

The big beef that cyber experts have with the new proposed law is that it continues to give the government a free pass to ride roughshod on an individual’s right to data privacy even as it cranks up the maximum penalty on data fiduciaries violating its provisions to as high as Rs 500 crore.