Data privacy and IT rules

MP of Bengaluru south and BJYM president Tejasvi Surya sat down for a chat with Abhinav Prakash about the new data protection law and its implications.

Talking about Big tech imperialism following the refusal of twitter to comply with the new policy framework of India, Tejasvi said that the entire issue boiled down to the simple idea of international jurisprudence which mandated any company that wished to operate in any sovereign country needed to obey the law of the land. The only exception to this was during the colonization and now that the world is past that era it was but natural for companies like Twitter to follow the rules and regulations laid out by the government under the purview of the constitution.

Mincing no words he clarified that the government was serious about twitter complying with policies of the land. He said recently twitter was behaving arbitrarily and was blatantly tagging tweets of people belonging to the right as manipulated media etc and sighted the example of the tweet by Mr. Sambit  Patra national spokesperson of the BJP; but the same twitter frowned ignorance when there was fake news circulated from the opposite side of the ideological spectrum.

Elaborating further he said that in spite of receiving multiple warnings from the central government twitter failed to appoint a grievance redressal officer and hence the central government was compelled to take action against twitter and this type of arbitrary curtailment of freedom of expression was unacceptable for a liberal democracy like India.

He underscored that an algorithm audit was necessary to make social media platforms more transparent and taxation of these platforms under Indian laws was necessary and said that he had already written to the concerned ministry about it.

Mr. Surya also assured that personal data protection bill which was soon going to be a law had robust measures to take care of citizen’s data.