DailyPost 662
DATA AND THE LAW
Enactment of a new law at times provides legality to things already in vogue & at times provides a direction to the society to move ahead. It is correctional both prospective or retrospective depending on the nature of the enactment. Data protection as it stands is a mixture of the two. It has too many stakeholders. The technical complexity is not easily understandable.
Not only does it needs to be understood, all the stakeholders should understand it exactly the same. In best of areas law gets into the realm of interpretation. Here the subject; data is open to interpretation. To confound it further there are different types of data, metadata being one of them. There is data within data, the movement of data is data itself. This trajectory has to nearly controlled, otherwise, the data misuse cannot be checked.
While the legal terminology of data controller, data processer etc seems clear, the actual operations is more akin to the ocean bed which cannot be visualised from the superficial levels however much be try. With outsourced agends, processors outside control, supposed usage for R & D and unknown operations of the known stakeholders. Who complies to whom & if he doesn’t it is not even known, ex.Cambridge Analytica. What tertiary & super tertiary use of data can fetch to the owners and operators is way beyond our imagination. What is the legal framework to bring whole of the digital eco-system under control? The enforcement mechanism would have to be much more imaginative than the law itself.
Becoming a saint after tasting blood is not an easy proposition. Trillions of dollars run on data being used beyond it’s single transaction. It’s an war of attrition. From data point of view it is asymmetrical against the governments. But it’s worth the battle, notwithstanding the travails. The data owner has to be rechristened.
CREATING DATA SANITY IS A WAR OF ATTRITION.
Sanjay Sahay