Airtel, Jio, Ola, Uber & Others Summoned By Parliamentary Panel Over Data Security Concerns

A Joint Committee of Parliament issued a notice on Wednesday calling representatives of telecom operators Reliance Jio and Airtel and cab aggregators Ola and Uber to depose before it on the issue of data security.

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Telecom operators Jio and Airtel along with cab aggregators Ola and Uber were summoned by a Parliamentary panel in regards to the issue of data protection and security. The Joint Committee of Parliament issued these summonses on Wednesday. The committee is chaired by BJP's Lok Sabha MP Meenakshi Lekhi and is currently examining the Personal Data Protection Bill 2019. Representatives of Reliance Jio Infocomm and Jio Platforms have been called to depose before the panel on two different sittings on November 4, according to the notice. Representatives of Ola and Uber have been called to appear before the panel the next day on November 5. Representatives of Airtel and Truecaller are scheduled to depose before the panel separately on November 6. Until now, representatives of social media giants Facebook and Twitter and e-commerce major Amazon have already appeared before the panel. Besides these, Google and Paytm are also scheduled to appear before the panel on October 29. The Personal Data Protection Bill was introduced in Lok Sabha by Minister of Electronics and Information Technology Ravi Shankar Prasad on December 11, 2019. The bill seeks to provide for protection of personal data of individuals and establishment of a data protection authority for the same. The bill was later referred to a joint select committee of both Houses of Parliament. The proposed law seeks bar on storing and processing of personal data by entities without the explicit consent of an individual. As these giants deal with large amount of data, from telephone records to movement details of an individual, if leaked to the web, the user may become seriously prone to cyber-attacks. In 2017, India ranked third in the list of countries which detected the highest number of cyber attacks according to software firm Symantec. After the Internet revolution of 2016, which was bought by JIO as the company flooded the market with cheapest data in the world, the rate of cyber-crimes have been sky-rocketed.