Union Minister for Electronics and IT Ravi Shankar Prasad told the Rajya Sabha on Friday that the government had finalised the data protection law and it would soon be introduced in Parliament.
Mr. Prasad said the government was in the process of finalising guidelines for social media intermediaries such as Facebook, Twitter, You Tube, Google and WhatsApp.
The draft bill, which was released last year, had proposed that critical personal data of Indian citizens be processed in centres located within the country. It had also proposed financial penalties for data processor for violations of the data protection law. Likening Google to the East India Company, BJP MP Rakesh Sinha said that companies in the West have collected data related to all aspects of the lives of Indians and this was a step in the direction of “neo-imperialism.”
Responding to this, Mr. Prasad said, “irrespective of how big the company was, if they tried to manipulate the data of Indians, strict action would be initiated.”
While responding to a question on hacking of data, Mr. Prasad said as per the information provided by the Reserve Bank of India, a total of 1191, 1372, 2059 and 921 cases of frauds involving ATM/debit cards, credit cards and Internet banking frauds (amount involving ₹1 lakh and above) were reported during the years 2015-16, 2016-17, 2017-18 and 2018-19 (Up to Sept. 30, 2018) respectively. “In comparison to the number of transactions, the number of fraud or data manipulation was miniscule,” he said.
