Privacy Law & India
Till late, privacy was governed by the consitution of India, considered as fundamental right guranteed by Article 21 of the Constitution of India and many precedents have been laid in this regard by Supreme Court of India. And it has also been included to some extent under section 43A Information Technology Act, which deals with sensitive personal data contained in a computer system.
But after controversial radia tapes leak, Government of India has decided to introduce an exhaustive law on privacy, known as “Right to Privacy”, which will soon be introduced before the parliament. This law provides for stringent punishment, including revocation of licences of telecom service providers, for illegally intercepting telephone calls and making their content public. This would be punishable with five years of imprisonment and a fine of Rs 1 Lakh.
The Bill defines “right to privacy as confidentiality of communication, family life, bank and health records, protection of honour and good name and protection from use of photographs, fingerprints, DNA samples and other samples taken at police stations and other places”. [courtesy: Deccan Chronicle]
The said bill would also be a blow to the illegal snooping done upon the citizens of India mostly by various private agency. Though, Government Employees won’t be spared, as head of the department would be held responsible in case of found circulating the intercepted data in public. Though, still Goverenment would enjoy privileges in the interest of the security of the state, etc. According to a recent statistics released by Google, Indian Government has been ranked third in Snooping through google, as reported by the Economic Times. Though only 22 percent of the requests have been accepted by Google, which resulted in removal of google search results, blogs, videos, etc.
The Bill may also serve as a proper guide to International Organizations like Google, whose Google Street View project has been stopped from taking any further pictures in the city of Bangalore for the Google Earth software.
… more of latest news in this month’s CyberLawTimes Newsletter @ http://www.cyberlawtimes.com/newsletter.html
Hi,
I am being followed for the past few months and am not sure how to deal with this matter ,i live in chennai but do not know any good lawyers to approach, could you please suggest some firms.
Thanks,
Anand.
Hi Anand,
yes u are absolutely right .There is a shortage of Cyber-law lawyers and only some officials that have some knowledge of cyber law is acting as a consultant or adviser but there are lots of firms working with the domain of security.few of them includes
KPMG Banglore
SecurEyes banglore etc.
I am a student pursuing my masters in the same domain that is CYBER LAW and INFORMATION SECURITY. If you have some particular work or something then please u can ask it to me. I will suggest you the best of my knowledge.
Thanks.
Regards,
Atul Patel
MS-CLIS
National Law Institute University