Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) on the data protection bill has sent summon to representatives of Visa & MasterCard. The move suggests that the panel could shift its focus to provisions regarding data localization in the law. The panel Led by BJP MP Meenaskhi Lekhi said that they will also summon Paypal (another popular payment gateway), & Cyble i.e. a cyber threat intelligence firm.
The panel also questioned the officials of social media such as Twitter & Google. According to researchers of market, in 2019 India had 47 million credit users and is expected to grow substantially increase during the cashless economy initiative of government. In India the use of Debit card is at higher level India.
The draft prepared for the data protection law serves as legal basis for the Right to privacy in India. The law will require all companies in in India to keep data of all it users. The previous version of law suggested that all the personal data must mandatorily be stored & processed, which was drafted by the committee led by Justice BN Srikrishna. But the 2019 bill allows the companies to take the data as long as it’s not critical and also after obtaining consent. This has significant implications for companies that use cloud services, which is a network of for-hire servers often based outside of the country.
Till now US-based tech companies & social media giants have only opposed the data localization provision of the bill &said that the attempts to cross-border transfer of data can impact the prospects of business in India and also affect several startup companies in India.
