By Aishwarya Jagani
As India moves forward with its much-awaited Personal Data Protection Bill (PDPB), privacy critics fear that “backdoor clauses” could allow the government access to data without consent and could create a feckless oversight board whose members would serve the whim of officials.
“The two biggest flaws are the lack of independence of the Data Protection Authority and the several ‘backdoor clauses’ contained within the PDPB,” Rohin Garg of the Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF), a privacy-rights organization in New Delhi, told Digital Privacy News.
Even B.N. Srikrishna, a retired India Supreme Court judge who led the committee that drafted the first version of the bill in 2018, attacked exemptions legislators since have added, telling Digital Privacy News that the bill now could “slide into an Orwellian state.”
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