Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023

 New data law, a barrier to journalistic free speech

Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023

In the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, the removal of ‘journalistic exemption’ highlights the need for more robust public consultation

In August 2023, India got its first comprehensive data protection law, the Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act, 2023. 

Provision of law

The law is largely based on users giving consent for the processing of their personal data. 

It provides basic rights such as 

• access to and erasure of data,
•  some obligations on companies, 
• and establishes a complaints body for grievance redress., 
• the law might have an invisible impact on journalistic free speech.
  

Normally, data protection laws exempt journalistic activities from privacy obligations 

such as notifying users and taking their consent before using their personal data. 

Three previous drafts of the DPDP Act had exemptions for journalistic activities, but the final law withdrew such an exemption. 

The Editors Guild of India also pointed to this risk and in a letter to the government, requested that journalistic activities be exempted from the DPDP Act.

An impediment

Now you may ask, what does privacy have to do with journalistic free speech?

1 Imagine that you are a journalist writing about a Member of Parliament (MP) and his performance. 

2, you use information from their lives such as the meetings they held, where, and with whom, the towns, villages, and cities they travelled to.

•  How often did they use a private jet or a chartered plane? 
  

• What about their financial background and also the investments made by their close family members? 
  

3 Most of this information is not available in the public domain and needs a lot of research.

All this information about an MP is their ‘personal data’, which is data protected under the DPDP Act. 

4 Consequently, any journalist who wishes to use this data will have to get their consent before publishing the story. 

5 Even after publication, the MP / Gov can exercise their right to erasure and request journalists to delete such stories.

call for information

1 Act empowers the government to call for information from any data processor in India.

2 this may impact the confidentiality that journalists must maintain for their sources and research documents. 

3  this need for journalists to get permission before publishing their story, and  government to call for information would likely impede a journalist’s ability . 

No clarification

need 

1  adopt a more robust and transparent public consultation process around proposed laws. 

2 One of the primary ways to get feedback on a law is to institute an ‘open and transparent’ public consultation model.

3 Indian government released three separate drafts of the data protection law for public consultation, none of the comments received on the drafts has ever been released in the public domain.

An appeal

exempt any data processor 

Under the Act, the central government has the power to exempt any data processor or ‘classes’ of data processors from any provisions of the law. 

These give wide powers to the government to single-handedly provide and take away an exemption — but it is the quickest route available in this case.

 Although an exemption for journalistic work should form part of the core text of the law, the government must use this rule to exempt journalistic entities, including citizen journalists, from any obligations under the DPDP Act. This will ensure that the DPDP Act does not have negative consequences on journalistic free speech in India.

source the hindu