Trai chief thinks that data companies are playing up with the Aadhaar privacy

Internet companies that have built their businesses using public data are likely to have created privacy threat debate around the country's unique digital ID Aadhaar, Trai Chairman R S Sharma said on Monday. "My suspicion, I will have to prove that, but based on circumstantial evidence, we think that many of data companies are behind Aadhaar issue. They want to create their own identity system," Sharma said at 'International Colloquium on Ethics and Governance of Autonomous AI Systems'.

Sharma, who was involved in the development of Aadhaar, said that the Supreme Court after a lot of deliberations held there is no threat to individual privacy from Aadhaar and despite this judgement, many people continue to debate on Aadhaar. "Why would somebody want a national identity to develop and become a national digital identity register. Many of these oppositions (to Aadhaar) are happening because of these guys (data companies). They think that they should develop ID for the world," Sharma said.

He said that oil companies are no longer among the top 10 companies of the world but data companies are and their revenues are more than that of 60-70 countries. India is estimated to generate six exabytes of data per month which is the highest in the world. "Because of fundamentally different nature of this commodity called data, our legal systems are extremely obsolete to deal with data, except we have now had privacy as a fundamental right. Our legal systems are all built upon the physical world," Sharma said.

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India in its recommendation on data ownership issued in July last year had expressed similar views. It has said that rules for the protection of personal data in the telecom space are not sufficient and suggested that consumers be given the right to choice, consent and to be forgotten to safeguard their privacy. Trai had recommended that the right to Choice, notice, consent, data portability, and right to be forgotten should be conferred upon the telecommunication consumers.

Sharma said that there is a need to develop framework and standards for interoperability and portability of data so that an individual who owns data should have the right to access his data or get a copy of that. He said that like European data protection rules, India also needs to come up with such norms soon.

(With inputs from agencies.)