Heena Sharma Blog

In an era of technological advancement, where the growth of the digital economy has meant the use of data as a critical means of communication, the Personal Data Protection Bill is proposed to ensure the informational privacy of individuals, and ensuring empowerment, progress and innovation The Personal Data Protection Bill was introduced in the Lok Sabha on Wednesday, and referred to a Joint Select Committee (JSC) following a voice vote. Well, according to parliamentary procedure, the Bill could also have been referred to the departmental committee, which in this case, would be the parlimentary standing committee on information technology, headed by Congress leader Shashi Tharoor. However, it didn’t happen that way and Tharoor objected to the proposal of sending the Bill to the JSC and also wrote to Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla to register "strong concerns" with Prasad's proposal. He said the Committee on IT has a mandate and a parliamentary responsibility to ...

Privacy violations under the DNA Bill cannot be addressed under the draft data protection bill Current Affairs News : Following close on the heels of the release of the draft Personal Data Protection Bill, 2018 (PDP Bill) release, is the proposed DNA Technology (Use and Application) Regulation Bill, 2018 (DNA Bill), which was introduced in parliament this monsoon session. This DNA Bill is the latest in a series that originated as the “DNA Profiling Bill” in 2007. Since then, the proposed law has gone through multiple iterations – with each version raising privacy concerns, such as the lack of adequate standards for consent, notice, retention and security of data. Chief amongst these privacy concerns is the fact that each of these iterations seems to grant near-sweeping powers to the state for the collection of DNA samples, with very few safeguards to protect citizens. Unfortunately, the present DNA Bill does little to address these concerns. For instance, the Bill...