(17/01/18) NEW DELHI :
The Member of Parliament Baijyant Panda today addressed a session on Data Protection and Privacy at IAMAI 12th India Digital Summit. As a Rajyasabha MP in his first term he was the first member of parliament in India to have his own personal website back in 2003.
He has been at the forefront of fighting the privacy battle and has also voiced his concerns against Aadhar before, which he now advocates as a necessity as well.
Today speak at IDS session he said, “We have had increasing violation of privacy, increasing misuse of credit cards and so on. But given the modern times we have to be little lenient towards our privacy concern in modern era”.
He further added, “We can not have absolute privacy in modern era. We have CCTV cameras at public places, we have body scanners at Airports so the concern should really be what are narrow exceptions to privacy that can be brought in the paradigm of law”.
However he maintained that privacy must be one of the basic rights of every citizen said that no such law should be used do unnecessary surveillance on citizens as well.
He further said, “I hear of many advocates of providing data localisation in India. When it comes to laws that we want to enforce we need to have extensive study of both startups and large companies”.
Talking about compromised privacy in modern times with or without our concern he said, “We routinely compromise our privacy for our convenience without even thinking much about it. It happens all the time while downloading or using many apps. We need to find the right balance. Privacy should not be treated as an elitist concept but it shall also not be a rigid concept that deny’s modern innovations to ease our life”.
