The government should draw inspiration from the Personal Data Protection Bill, 2018, to oversee government access to non-personal data, and there must be a system of checks and balances, a speaker said at MediaNama’s roundtable discussion on non-personal data, held in November 2019. A number of recommendations for governing non-personal data emerged. Most participants agreed that any framework that the government or the committee of experts on non-personal data came up with should keep the following questions in mind: What is the due process of law? Who orders access to non-personal data? Is it responsible enough? What are the checks and balances in place for this access? Does it pass the test of public good? Where should those checks and balances be in place across the industry? When can the government make a trade-off between group privacy/autonomy and social good? Proportionality analysis of harms is necessary to answer this question. Under this framework, a speaker clarified, the government should actually notify what data sets come under public good, national security, etc., and if they pass those tests. However, a participant disagreed and said that we don’t need separate regulation for non-personal data and instead called for a more general protection against misuse of all data. (Note: The discussion was held under the Chatham House Rule; quotes have not been attributed to specific people. Quotes are not verbatim and have been edited for clarity and to preserve anonymity. Also note that this discussion took place before the PDP Bill, 2019, was…
