Trilegal co-founding partner Rahul Matthan has drafted a proposal for the department of personnel training to create an Indian privacy and data protection law that would regulate the storage and disclosure of personal information. The approach paper requests views of the public and experts and sets out the issues involved in Indian privacy legislation. Matthan stated that at this stage it is just an approach paper.
One of the inevitable consequences of the UID Project will be that the UID Number will unify multiple databases. Such a vast interlinked public information database is unprecedented in India. It is imperative that appropriate steps be taken to protect personal data before the vast government storehouses of private data are linked up and the threat of data security breach becomes real. Similarly, the private sector entities such as banks, telecom companies, hospitals, etc. are collecting vast amount of private or personal information about individuals. There is tremendous scope for both commercial exploitation of this information without the consent/ knowledge of the individual In view of the above, privacy of individual is to be protected both with reference to the actions of Government as well as private sector entities.
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