Neither the right to privacy nor the right to information

General Studies Paper 3

Context

• The Digital Personal Data Protection Bill 2023 makes the government less transparent to the people and ends up making them transparent to both the government and private interests.

The Bill

• Personal data bill will boost digital economy, says Nasscom.’ This industry response to the Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Bill 2023 that was introduced in Parliament reveals the real purpose of the Bill — legalising data mining rather than safeguarding the right to privacy.
• The right to privacy was reaffirmed by a nine-judge Constitutional bench of the Supreme Court in 2017.
• The right to information provides us access to government documents to ensure transparency and accountability of the government.
• Enacted as a law, the Right to Information Act (RTI) 2005 has played a critical role in deepening democratic practices.
• The much-awaited DPDP Bill 2023 ends up undermining our right to information, without doing much to protect our right to privacy.

The issues of Rights

• In a crucial way, the two rights complement each other.
• Broadly speaking, the right to information seeks to make the government transparent to us, while the right to privacy is meant to protect us from government (and increasingly, private) intrusions into our lives.
• Yet, there are some tensions between the right to information and the right to privacy.
• However, the recently introduced DPDP Bill 2023 makes little attempt to deal with these hard questions. Instead, it makes the government less transparent to us while making us transparent to both the government and private interests.

Undermining the Right to Information

• The Right to Information Act 2005 anticipated some of these tensions and the consequent need to limit its own reach.
• Therefore, Section 8 of the RTI 2005 listed situations where “exemption from disclosure of information” would be granted.
• Section 8(1)(j) grants exemption from disclosure if the information which relates to personal information sought has no relationship to any public activity or interest, or which would cause unwarranted invasion of the privacy of the individual, unless a public information officer feels that larger public interest justifies disclosure.
• It set a high benchmark for exemption – information which cannot be denied to the Parliament or a State Legislature shall not be denied to any person.
• The DPDP Bill 2023 suggests replacing Section 8(1)(j) with just “information which relates to personal information”. This will undermine the RTI 2005.

Ignoring social, political and legal context

• The DPDP 2023 suffers from other shortcomings. For instance, the Data Protection Board, an oversight body will be under the boot of the government as the chairperson and members are to be appointed by the central government.
• The DPDP Bill 2023 attempts to pass off a lame-duck as a watchdog.
• In Europe, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) set a high standard for data protection. It has a strong watchdog that operates in a society with universal literacy, and high digital and financial literacy.
• Restricting data collection is not even being discussed in India.

Conclusion

• A weak board combined with the lack of universal literacy and poor digital and financial literacy, as well as an overburdened legal system, mean that the chances that citizens will be able to seek legal recourse when privacy harms are inflicted on them are slim.