Data is not safe in the absence of privacy laws in India: Experts

The biggest ever data theft case unearthed by the Telangana police has come as a shocker for the people.

It may be recalled the Cyberabad police has arrested a person couple of days ago for stealing, procuring, holding and selling personal and confidential data of 66.9 crore individuals and organisations from 24 states and 8 metropolitan cities.

Police found the accused possessing data of students of Byjus and Vedanta organisations. He also has in his custody the data of 1.84 lakh cab users of 08 metro cities and data of 4.5 lakh salaried employees of 06 cities and Gujarat state.

Further the accused holds customer data of major organisations like GST (Pan India), RTO (Pan India), Amazon, Netflix, Youtube, Paytm, Phonepe, Big Basket, BookMyShow, Instagram, Zomato, Policy Bazar, Upstox, etc.

The case in hand makes one thing clear that the privacy laws in India are very weak. Every commercial outlet is collecting the mobile number from the customers when the latter make any purchase though there is no need for the same.

And the data pool is sold to third party. There is no one to explain where the data of individuals is stored and how it is protected. There is no regulation on it, say experts.

“When people buy insurance all the details are sold to other insurance companies. I personally faced this. My data and my full information were with another insurance company. I don’t know how they shared my information to another company without my consent. It is unethical and as an individual I don’t have the power to fight against it”, P Krishna, a victim from Delhi told The Wallpost.

“Social media platforms also sell your data to anyone. Private banks circulate their customers data with other private banks. No one is acting on this. There is no regulation. We are in constant threat and there is no privacy at all”, he said.

A data expert said mobile phone operators use your data left and right. There is absolutely no control on them. They even know which device you are using with IMEI number and they sell the data to phone manufacturers and many other businesses they are diversified into.

All companies employ data analysts and their job is to play with the data. Biggest threat is ecommerce and digital payments. They have both bank data and personal data. No one knows how they protect and what will happen in case of loss of data, the expert said.

Job portals store all your information and sell it others. Now a days they have started to record videos of the individuals and store online. It will be disastrous if the videos land in the hands of anti-social elements and edit the voice and publish the videos, another expert said. Some European countries are implementing stricter data privacy laws. But India is only still talking about privacy laws. There is an urgent need to introduce and implement strict privacy laws to prevent economic crimes, the experts said.