-The Hindu MPs raise questions on Privacy, purpose and Srikrishna panel report The Joint Parliamentary Committee on Personal Data Protection Bill will throw open its doors for all stakeholders to express objections and point out loopholes in the proposed legislation, the panel decided at its first meeting held on Thursday. IT Secretary Anshu Prakash gave a presentation giving details of the bill. “Today was just a preliminary briefing, we didn’t go into the bill...

-The New Indian Express The Survey of India plans to use drones to create a high-resolution map of every inch of India. It comes with unprecedented Privacy and security challenges The Survey of India (SoI) has embarked upon an ambitious project of using drone imaging to create an ultra-high resolution spatial and topographic map of India. Professor Ashutosh Sharma, Secretary, Department of Science and Technology, calls it the biggest endeavour in Indian...

-The Indian Express In another significant departure from the draft Bill, the Bill allows personal data to be stored and processed abroad, without requiring a mirror of the data in India. The Personal Data Protection Bill listed to be introduced in Lok Sabha on Wednesday has allowed transfer of certain types of personal data overseas, but has given broad powers to government agencies to collect personal and sensitive data of citizens. An earlier...

-The Indian Express The relationship of the RTI with the judiciary has been fraught from the beginning. Since the RTI Act conferred powers on the chief justice of the Supreme Court of India and the chief justices of high courts of states for carrying out its provisions, all these courts framed their own rules. On November 13, a five-judge Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court passed its order in the Subhash...

-The Hindu Why the right to Internet access and digital literacy should be recognised as a right in itself Recently, in Faheema Shirin v. State of Kerala, the Kerala High Court declared the right to Internet access as a fundamental right forming a part of the right to Privacy and the right to education under Article 21 of the Constitution. While this is a welcome move, it is important to recognise the...