Right to privacy to push Google, Facebook, Internet cos to rethink data policies

Law professionals | Corporate lawyer- Rs 6,10,000 | Senior attorney- Rs 9,50,000 | Interpreting and using the rule of the law to win arguments in favour of the client is a lucrative profession. The best lawyers earn several lakhs, even crores for a case. So much so that lawyers give up offers to become a judge so that they can maintain their incomes as lawyers! Being a lawyer requires a high level of patience, education and communication skills.

The Supreme Court upholding privacy as a fundamental right will cause companies like Facebook, Google as well as digital startups to rethink their data handling strategies, said experts.

The ruling said that the Right to Privacy is a part of the fundamental rights guaranteed by the Constitution to Indian citizens under Article 21.

“India is a market which has very significant consumers of digital services. How they (companies) collect information and how they process it will definitely undergo a change,” said Jaspreet Singh, partner, cybersecurity at consultancy EY.

For instance, users give apps such as Facebook access to their phone books, and people often see their phone contacts popping up as friend suggestions on the social network.

In an email reply to Moneycontrol a Google spokesperson said, "The security and privacy of our users’ information has always been a top priority. As we outline in our privacy policy, we use information with the consent of our users. We also provide tools like ‘My Account’ to give users control over the information they share from a single hub. More than 1 billion people have visited My Account since 2015."

Singh said that private companies similarly share a lot of data among several agencies, with a larger ecosystem, third parties, and contractors and so on, allowing data to be shared with a lot of organisations.

Another significant impact will be on the WhatsApp privacy policy case, which was referred to a five-judge bench in the Supreme Court. The case relates to a petition filed against WhatsApp sharing its data with parent company Facebook.

“This judgement creates a broad lakshmanrekha. It allows you to say that the government needs to regulate the private sector,” said Raman Jit Singh Chima of the Internet Freedom Foundation, which advocates a free and open Internet.

He added that the Thursday judgement puts the shutter on Courts asking for privacy precedents in the United States or European markets. “An iron-clad, core element of privacy is established,” he said.

It is not just foreign headquartered companies that will be impacted, but also domestic ones, including startups.

Most large Internet companies’ privacy policies and terms of service have been modelled around US privacy laws. However, with the Supreme Court establishing privacy as a fundamental right, technology and data collecting companies will have to explicitly tell users how they will use their data.

“It is not just incumbent on them. They are morally obliged to these customers and tell them we are recording certain details, this is how we use the data and this is how you opt out of this. They will have to explicitly ask for consent,” said Faisal Farooqui, founder of o line review portal Mouthshut.com.

This is especially true of companies that collect financial data, like payment wallets.

The 547-page judgement has touched upon the challenge of defining privacy in the technology era in several instances, and has left the room open for further regulation to develop as technology changes.

“Future developments in technology and social ordering may well reveal that there are yet more constitutional sites in which a privacy right inheres that are not at present evident to us,” Justice S A Bobde has said.