"Here's the new reality: if you were out there collecting information about a consumer, wittingly or unwittingly, and you are using that to mine [data] and sell, that business is going to shut down. It won't be a free run as far as the use of consumer data is concerned," Rajya Sabha MP Rajeev Chandrasekhar said at an IAMAI Forum on data protection and privacy yesterday. He also said, when asked about the impact on innovation, that he strongly believes that "there is no contradiction between what you want to achieve out of privacy, and what you want to achieve with technology. These are not contradictory if you do them in a creative, flexible and open minded manner, where we achieve both these objectives." "The issue has been that there's an imbalance in the way we have things today between consumers of digital products and providers of the same. This is also about evening the balance between corporates and the big guys, and the small guys," he said during the fireside chat with Google's Chetan Krishnaswamy. "On the punitive issue: we don't need to start with people going to jail or [there being] high fines every time they violate the privacy of an individual. But I think we can have a three strikes type of system, with a graded approach. There can be an evolving model of punitive, and punitive it must be. Having been an entrepreneur in telecom, I know that you need laws and enforcement of laws, and…
