Why is Data Privacy Important?

It’s the 21st Century and we are living in the Information age. Data is the Biggest asset of individuals and organizations today. It is more precious than Land and Gold. The importance of data is a well known universal fact, even after that, Personal Data is the most ignored possession among people in developing countries. In this article, we are going to discuss the vital need of Data privacy and implementation of Data protection legal framework.

What is Data Privacy?

According to Wikipedia ,Information privacy, or data privacy (or data protection), is the relationship between the collection and dissemination of data, technology, the public expectation of privacy, and the legal and political issues surrounding them.” In more simple words, Data privacy is the aspect of having control over your information. Data Privacy refers to the ability to regulate the processing of your data. Your data is private if you and only you can decide the harnessing of your information. Concluding the above, we can say that Data Privacy is a condition where the owner decides the sharing limits of his Data.

The Growing Need for Data Privacy

Data Protection is not only the concern of individuals of any particular class of the society. It also not belongs to a particular business type or Industry. Both the individuals as well as organizations are the stakeholders of Data Privacy. For Example, a company can have the sensitive data of millions of customers. Similarly, an individual can have personal information like financial data, including bank account and credit card numbers, health and medical records, and even basic, but still personalised sensitive info, such as full names, addresses and birthdates. So, Data privacy is a concern of both Individuals as well as Organization. As an individual, no one wants to share his credit card details by the Bank to third parties. The Personal Identification Number of a person contains all his personal information even biometrics. so protecting it from the unreliable sources becomes the vital need.

There should be a healthy relationship between the Data Principals (whose Data is collected) and the Data fiduciaries (those who process the Data ). The absence of a lawful contract between these two may lead to Data Breach. Data Breach is a condition of sharing of secure and private data with third parties, who may be unfaithful. Recently, Facebook was accused of sharing its user’s data with a third party Cambridge Analytica. They used the personal data of users to affect the General elections in the USA. Similarly, some companies collect the sensitive data of their customers and sell them for market research purposes. The Personal data, which you are ignoring act as a fuel in Business in the age of Data-Driven Marketing.

In India, a hot debate is going on the Privacy of Aadhar Details collected by UIDAI. The Supreme Court of India has also issued a lot of Sensitive Guidelines over Collection of Data and Harnessing it. Recently, Reserve Bank of India has ordered Bharti Airtel and Paytm to stop doing eKYC of its users

So, we can conclude that access of unlawful bodies to the private data may be hazardous for the data owner in many numbers of ways. Hence, a Data Privacy Legal framework is the essential requirement of society. A regulatory Body should exist in every country which can monitor the harnessing of Data and its Collection.

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