IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad today said that the new data protection law will be finalized soon, asserting that India must strike a fine balance between data availability, innovation and privacy issues.
He urged entrepreneurs to help India become a big centre for data analysis. “How can you help India become a big centre of data analysis? …as someone said, data is the new oil,” Mr Prasad said clearly referring to industrialist Mukesh Ambani’s often repeated statement that ‘data is the new oil.’
Prasad’s comments come at a time when data privacy has taken centre stage in global digital narrative.
“We are erecting the architecture…cyber laws are being improved…cyber training and cyber forensics are being taken care of,” he said while outlining India’s aspiration to become a big centre for data analysis.
Mr Prasad further concluded by saying that “My take on data privacy is very simple. There has to be a balance between data availability, data utility, data innovation, data anonymity and data privacy.” This statement of his comes after over the last few weeks, the US social networking giant Facebook drawing intense criticism from users and governments globally over the data leak scandal that hit millions of users.
Information of over 80 million Facebook users was allegedly harvested by data analytics and political consulting firm, Cambridge Analytica, leading to a global backlash against the company
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