Facebook To Appear Before Joint Parliamentary Committee Today To Depose On India’s Data Protection Bill

It is Facebook’s turn to face the regulators again, this time in India. The social network has been asked by the Joint Parliamentary Committee on Personal Data Protection Bill, 2019, to give its deposition on the data protection bill today, August 10. This will be the committee’s second meeting, after the previous sitting late last month. It is expected that Facebook will be asked about their policies on data collection, data storage and data security policies for Facebook users in India. The Personal Data Protection Bill, 2019 was introduced in the Parliament in December last year, and it sets down the rules for companies and services on how personal data should be processed and stored, and sets down the rights that consumers have with regard to their personal information being collected by companies, online and offline. You can read more here.

Personal Data Protection Bill, 2019 also includes the requirement of the creation of a data protection authority (DPA) to monitor incidents related to data theft, privacy breaches as well as a predefined set of fines and penalties for entities found flouting these norms. The bill makes it mandatory for entities to clarify why a user’s data is being collected, what all data will be collected, how long it will be stored and when as well as how it will be deleted from the temporary records. “Introduced the Personal Data Protection Bill in Lok Sabha today. This is a historic legislation which seeks to protect personal data and privacy of Indian citizens in digital age,” said Ravi Shankar Prasad, the Minister of Electronics and Information Technology, had said in a tweet at the time.