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India’s latest report on Non Personal Data, published by the Union Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology’s (MEITY) Committee of Experts has defined parameters regarding who can seek Non Personal Data, High Value Datasets, what a community is and who can represent it as a trustee, rights over non personal data, sovereign access to data, meta-data directories, and addressed intellectual property concerns. They’ve exempt entire raw databases from data requests, taken private data access out of the ambit of this framework, and defined purposes for which data can be accessed. Above all, it recommends a separate Non Personal Data legislation for governing NPD.
By Siddharth Sonkar
Recently, in his inaugural address, US President Joe Biden announced the appointment of Christopher Hoff, to oversee the negotiations over revising the United States (US)-European Union (EU) privacy shield the privacy pact which governed the relationship between the US and the EU in relation to international data transfers until it was invalidated on 16 July, 2020 by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in Data Protection Commission v. Facebook Ireland (Schrems II). The CJEU held that the protection afforded to data of EU persons in the US to be inadequate to an ‘essentially equivalent standard’ of protection as compared to that in the EU.
Last month, the Gopalakrishnan Committee released the revised report (
Report) on the regulatory framework governing non-personal data (
NPD) for public consultation. While the European Union regulates the flow of non-personal data across borders of different states, through an unprecedented framework, India may become the first to regulate the flow of NPD within national borders.
The Report defines non-personal data as data which is without any personal data (
PD). While the Report does not define PD, the Personal Data Protection (
PDP) Bill defines PD to include inter alia any information which is directly or indirectly capable of identifying an individual. Significantly, the Report considers PD which has been ‘anonymised’ (i.e. irreversibly de-identified) as NPD.