Trusted jurisdictions tag on those nations which respect rights of data principal: Rajeev Chandrasekhar

“There is a certain amount of reciprocity as we look to the future of digital trade and corridors of trust. In a post-Covid world, instead of globalisation and free for all, there will be these corridors of trust that will be between India and other like-minded nations,” Chandrasekhar said during a public consultation on the DPDP Bill of 2022.

A second key criterion would be countries where Indian law enforcement agencies would be able to legally access data of Indian citizens in cases of national security and other emergency situations, he said.

In the draft of the DPDP Bill of 2022, released for public consultation on November 18 this year, the IT ministry had said that the data of Indian citizens
could be stored and processed outside the geographical limits of India but only in trusted jurisdictions. The ministry then said these trusted jurisdictions would be defined by the government from time to time.

On Friday, Chandrasekhar said that the Ministry of Home Affairs would notify the trusted jurisdictions in consultation with other stakeholders, including the IT ministry.

During the public consultation on Friday, several policy advocacy groups raised objections on the deemed consent aspect mentioned in the draft of the DPDP Bill. They said that it could be grounds for companies to make continuous use of a user’s data under the garb of “deemed consent”.

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Responding to the question, Chandrasekhar, said that the use of the deemed consent provision, as mentioned in the draft of the DPDP Bill of 2022, would only be in emergency situations, and there would never be extended automatically to private companies.
The government would also finalise the executive rules surrounding the DPDP Bill of 2022 before taking them to the Parliament, Chandrasekhar said.

“Post the bill, the intermediaries will have to go for deep behavioral changes. It will no longer be business as usual for them,” he said.