Govt may make it mandatory for Google, Facebook, others to share user data

The Indian government is reportedly mulling over making it mandatory for tech company like Google, Facebook, and Amazon, to share the public data of users. The Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY) is apparently working on issuing new guidelines under the Information Technology Act which will require tech giants to share freely available data or the public information that they collate in the course of their operations, including traffic, buying and illness patterns, according to a report by The  Economic Times. [caption id=“attachment_6595931” align=“alignnone” width=“1024”]  Google Search. Image: Google[/caption] Reportedly, the tech companies will have to share this information with anyone in the country seeking access to it, including government and private entities. These companies could actually monetise public data that they gather. We have reached out to MeitY to learn more about these new guidelines. A MeitY official apparently said that currently this is only being mulled over and a “final decision will be taken only after an ’exhaustive’ consultation process.” Apparently, the official said that “these big tech companies certainly were the first ones to come up with the idea and do the work, so just like in critical medicines, they should have the right to charge an economic fee for sharing it.” In addition to that, these new guidelines will reportedly also talk about the ‘universal access to the database generated from its citizens’. The govt apparently wants to do this to promote healthy competition.