Echoing Centre's stand, White House calls for stronger protection of sensitive data

On September 8, the White House convened a meeting with experts and practitioners on the harm that tech platforms cause, and identified concerns in competition, privacy, algorithmic discrimination and so on.

This comes at a time India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) has been stressing the need for accountability of Big Tech firms through amendments to Information Technology (IT) Rules 2021 and National Data Governance Framework Policy.

After the White House meeting, the Biden administration zeroed in on the need for clear rules to ensure promotion of competition in the technology sector.

“We need clear rules of the road to ensure small and mid-size businesses and entrepreneurs can compete on a level playing field, which will promote innovation for American consumers and ensure continued US leadership in global technology,” the White House said in a briefing.

Protection of privacy

Similarly, the US government also called for federal protection of Americans’ privacy.

“We especially need strong protections for particularly sensitive data such as geolocation and health information, including information related to reproductive health,” it added.

The administration also called for regulation that can safeguard children by putting in place strong “privacy and online protections” and by prioritising safety through design standards and removing special legal protections for large tech platforms.

Additionally the administration also stressed the need for increasing transparency about social media platforms’ algorithms and content moderation decisions and to “stop discriminatory algorithmic decision-making.”

“Platforms are failing to provide sufficient transparency to allow the public and researchers to understand how and why such decisions are made, their potential effects on users, and the very real dangers these decisions may pose,” it said.

Indian context

Closer home, Minister of State for MeitY Rajeev Chandrasekhar said "platforms who ignore their legal responsibilities of due diligence and permit illegal activities and misinformation" were a threat to a “safe and trusted internet.”

This also comes at a time the Indian government is looking at a “complete overhaul” of the country’s cyber laws.

Union minister Ashwini Vaishnaw recently said the government would introduce a proposed new version of the Data Protection bill and amendment to the Informat Technology Act 2000, known as the Digital India Act, to make “the online world more accountable for what is being published.”

In the next few days, the Union government is going to come out with the amendments to the IT Rules, Chandrasekhar said at an event on September 7.

The amendments were proposed because the grievance redressal mechanism of social media companies was not working properly, the government said.

The ministry has also come in with the draft National Data Governance Framework (NDGFP) which proposes the launch of a non-personal data based India datasets.

During a consultation held on the proposed framework, MeitY had made it clear the datasets will not be shared with Big Tech. Sources had said that MeitY was of the opinion that Big Tech can correlate non-personal data with personal data.