By Subhashish Bhadra
Late last year, the Government-appointed committee on non-personal data released its second report. The first report, released in Sept ’20, had raised fears of ‘nationalisation of data’ and harming the commercial interests of data-based companies. The second report addresses several issues that were raised, and is a substantial improvement over the first. For a detailed comparison of the first and second report, you can read Ikigai Law’s summary.
There’s much to like in this new report. First among them is the fact that it restricts itself to a narrow goal of opening up non-personal data for public good purposes. It explicitly stays away from being a general non-personal data governance framework, which would have included direct government access to such data and B2B sharing of data (as was there in the first report). While not explicitly stated, this narrow goal also speaks to a market failure that data has positive externality, i.e. it can ben
What stood out:
Business purpose requests: Private entity to private entity mandatory data sharing requests are not considered to be in the scope of the committee’s recommendations.
NPD Legislation: The Committee of Experts has proposed that the Non Personal Data (NPD) framework become the basis of a new legislation for regulating NPD.
Sovereign purpose requests exempt: the Non Personal Data Authority will not adjudicate the validity of data requests under Sovereign purpose (national security, law enforcement etc).
Entire raw data databases exempt: The committee has limited data requests to specific data-fields, and no requests can be made for entire databases.