Data is the new Gold. Having access to data gives one the ability to access and control someone’s ID, bank accounts and all sorts of other information says Nitin Pandey, cyber security expert and chairman of National Information Security Council.
Data Privacy has become a big challenge in our country. Almost every Application is tracking and monitoring our activities.
On June 29, Government of India banned 59 Chinese apps including TikTok which was a good move to protect privacy.
On September 2, Government of India again banned 118 Chinese apps including PubG which shook China and Tencent, a chinese based company and stakeholder of PubG owner company Krafton losts $14 billion in market value after India bans PubG Game. India was PubG’s biggest market with 25 percent of total installs.
China always spy on Indian users with the help of these apps and they were also earning huge amount of money from Indian users of their apps. By banning these apps, we stopped the outflow of funds to overseas and that is mainly China.
It gives an opportunity to Indian IT companies to venture into Gaming world which has been almost non-existent so far. So, a good strategy would be to develop our own content and provide a platform to Indian Gamers.
On safety concern, these apps were addictive and psychologically these games and apps were making teenagers so much aggressive and violent.
We already know so many cases in which PubG addictive users killed their family members when asked not to play it too much. Many people died while making TikTok videos. It was really a very serious concern and so many petitions were filed against such apps.
Is it enough to secure our Privacy and safety? The point is when it comes to communication mediums then we are mostly dependent on U.S based tech companies like Facebook, Google and Twitter which sell our data to third parties. It is already in public domain that Facebook details of Indian users are available for sale on Dark Web.
Questions on UIDAI (Unique Identification Authority of India | Aadhar) data breach has been raised many times as well.
Almost each and every App takes unnecessary permission from us to track and monitor our activities. Taking permissions of required features are fine but apps like Hotstar take “Body Sensor” permissions from users which make these apps suspicious because Hotstar is an entertainment app, not a fitness app. We don’t know on the name of “Contact” permission what access these Apps are actually taking from us.
I always urge the Government of India to pass the Personal Data Protection Bill 2019 where a committee had formed by Ministry of IT & E in 2017 which was chaired by Retired Supreme Court Judge Justice BN Srikrishna and committee submitted the draft personal data protection bill in July 2018 and is still pending.
It is very important to pass the bill of Personal Data Protection to keep our data safe and secured.
By Nitin Pandey, chairman of National Information Security Council
Nitin Pandey is a world renowned Cyber Security Expert who has been acknowledged by Government of Russia, Sri Lanka, Brazil, India, Interpol, Intelligence agencies. He is also listed in Hall of Fame of Google, Dell, Microsoft etc.