Referencing the nine-judge privacy judgment of the Supreme Court from August, the group recommends that individual rights should be at the center of privacy and data protection.
A group of 24 lawyers and policy professionals has written a letter to the Justice BN Srikrishna Committee of Experts on Data Protection, asking for a more participatory and transparent process. In a letter dated January 31, the group has also made eight recommendations for what a data protection framework must address.
On November 27, the data protection committee had published a white paper, asking stakeholders to submit their views on a new data protection law by the end of December.
Referencing the nine-judge privacy judgment of the Supreme Court from August, the group recommends that individual rights should be at the center of privacy and data protection. It asks that the exceptions in data protection must be brought through proper laws, narrowly tailored with necessity and proportionality closely connected to their aim. Building on the idea of an independent regulator as the committee’s white paper had mentioned, the group says a privacy commission headed by a privacy commissioner must be established, at central and state levels, which must have the powers to investigate, adjudicate and enforce laws.
The group includes lawyers and public policy experts who have been part of various projects like the Save the Internet movement that had lobbied for net neutrality in 2015 and are representing the petition against Aadhaar in the Supreme Court.
The regulators, it says, should have “binding rule making powers” over both, private and government bodies, including the UIDAI. The group also says that the law should enable changes to the core features of the Aadhaar project, which are incompatible with the data protection statute.