Children's privacy rights and how anonymisation can preserve privacy rights reigned supreme during the sixth sitting of the Joint Parliamentary Committee on the Personal Data Protection Bill held on Monday afternoon, sources have told MediaNama. The committee, where members heard representations from L&L Law Firm (erstwhile Luthra and Luthra Law) and Foundation of Data Protection Professionals in India (FDPPI) in a two-and-a-half hour meeting, will next convene on August 11 at noon. Need for graded age of consent: L&L Law Firm proposed that a rigid age of consent for children was not a fruitful way of processing children's consent in the digital age. They instead proposed creating a graded approach to children's age of consent depending on the services in questions, three sources told us. The members discussed this issue at length. While L&L highlighted the problems with current methods of age verification online, they did not propose any specific age verification mechanisms. Currently, the Bill defines a child as someone under 18 years of age; all children's consent is mediated through their parent's. How anonymisation works: FDPPI spent much of their 90 minutes discussing what anonymisation means, how it works, and potential privacy harms associated with it, five sources told us. Members of the committee asked questions about whether anonymisation was enough to protect people's privacy, and if de-anonymisation posed a significant risk to users, two sources told us. FDPPI had proposed that the same data fiduciary that anonymises data should not be penalised for de-anonymising such data, three…
