By Trisha Jalan and Aroon Deep “What is more important between the privacy of one individual person or the life of a full community?” Biju Janata Dal MP Amar Patnaik asked. If people aren’t revealing information fearing stigma, what can the government do? he asked. "There is a legitimate state interest in collecting information such as a person’s name, their parents’ names, relatives’ names, places they have visited, etc," Patnaik said. The Odisha government had to divulge the name of a patient because all reasonable methods of contact tracing failed, he said. Issues such as how long the data will be collected for / stored, proportionality, minimum data required, and whether it has to be specified to a patient have to be pondered upon, he added. “Privacy is central to all these discussions, but it’s by no means the only human right that is being violated," Malavika Jayaram said. To frame privacy as a trade-off or a balancing act is extremely disingenuous. It’s extremely complicated and you have to deal with issues like accessibility, minorities, freedom, right to food, among others,” she added. MediaNama held an online event discussing Privacy in the era of COVID-19, on April 29, 2020, with participation of key stakeholders from law and policy. The discussion was supported by the Internet Society, Google, Facebook, and the Centre for Communications Governance at NLU, Delhi. Some of the issues around challenges to privacy, rights, and the global trends around privacy and data protection are summarised here. What governments…
Please subscribe to MediaNama. Don't share prints and PDFs.
You May Also Like
News
Google has released a Google Travel Trends Report which states that branded budget hotel search queries grew 179% year over year (YOY) in India, in...
Advert
135 job openings in over 60 companies are listed at our free Digital and Mobile Job Board: If you’re looking for a job, or...
News
By Aroon Deep and Aditya Chunduru You’re reading it here first: Twitter has complied with government requests to censor 52 tweets that mostly criticised...
News
Rajesh Kumar* doesn’t have many enemies in life. But, Uber, for which he drives a cab everyday, is starting to look like one, he...