Data privacy is a must, it should not be at the cost of innovation: RS Prasad

IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad has stated that data privacy must not come at the cost of innovation. This statement was made at a CII conference (Confederation of Indian Industry) held on 3 November. Prasad stated that even the Supreme Court insisted on the same. These statements come weeks after the **Supreme Court’s ruling on the legitimacy of Aadhaar** , a service that critics see as the largest privacy violation of its kind. The government is also working on finalising a more capable and comprehensive data protection law. India is also in the process of getting multinational companies to store data locally in the country. The RBI’s order for payments data to be stored in the country has also come into effect. Simultaneously, the government is still attempting to force companies like Facebook (WhatsApp) **to weaken encryption and allow them access to user data** when needed. “The stakeholder is the trustee of data on behalf of the owner of data. And every Indian must own data. However, there should be a healthy balance between openness, availability, utilisation and privacy of data,” Financial Express quotes Prasad as saying. On the matter of Aadhaar, Prasad made no mention of the **innumerable breaches** that saw the leakage of demographic data (name, address, phone number, etc.) of hundreds of millions of Indians. As has been UIDAI’s policy these past few years, Prasad only focused on the **security of the biometric data** , which, to be fair, has so far remained secure. Prasad claimed that biometric data is so secure that “even for a billionth of a second it can’t be breached.” He ended with a statement expounding the virtues of “digitisation” and its “transformational” nature. [caption id=“attachment_4721261” align=“alignnone” width=“1280”] File photo of Law and Justice minister Ravi Shankar Prasad. PTI[/caption]