Trai norms on data privacy by January

Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) will come out with its recommendations on guidelines for data privacy, security and ownership by January and is close to finalising suggestions for the Net Neutrality aspect. The recommendations on next round of spectrum auction will also be out before March 2018.

“Currently, there is a huge amount of monopoly and that monopoly is becoming bigger and bigger. We are saying you can use my data because we are using your application, but give us too so that we can use it for other purposes too... This should be finalised by December-January,” Trai chairman R S Sharma said.

“There are two parts to ownership of data… In a physical world, there is exclusivity in some sense. For example, if I have a pen you can’t have the same one. In a virtual world, because of the property of data, it is infinitely indivisible,” he said.

“We are saying you can use my data because we are using your application, but give us too so that we can use it for other purposes too,” he said. Such a principle will enable a lot of start-ups to come in the data business, where there is a huge monopoly.

Trai chairman also called for larger privacy laws in the country, saying the regulator’s recommendations may be sent to the Justice Srikrishna Committee set up by the Centre and tasked with suggesting a data privacy framework.

The government also plans to double the reach of telecom network in the country by 2020, Department of Telecommunications (DoT) secretary Aruna Sundararajan said at the same event.