The government may have to pay a ‘fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory’ remuneration for certain non-personal data that it requests from companies, a panel that is looking into the regulation of anonymized data has suggested.
The draft was released for public consultation on Sunday.
Last year, the government’s decision to form the committee, headed by Infosys co-founder S (Kris) Gopalakrishnan, had set off alarm bells among technology companies worried about mandatory sharing of their proprietary data.
“The Committee strongly believes that open-access to metadata and regulated access to the underlying data of Data Businesses will spur innovation and digital economy growth at an unprecedented scale in the country,” the panel suggested.
The panel said that companies will get nothing for sharing raw community data but can choose not to share proprietary knowledge data and algorithms at all. It added that appropriate data sharing mechanisms for sharing public, community, and private data need to be established.
It suggested that the remuneration for moderate value add processing on top of raw data will attract a fair price but if advanced processing is involved then private organisations can attract a market price for the same.
“With increasing value-add, it may just be required that the concerned data is brought to a well-regulated data market and price be allowed to be determined by market forces, within general frameworks of openness, fairness etc,” the draft recommended.
The Committee has defined three categories of Non-Personal Data – Public Non-Personal Data, Community Non-Personal Data & Private Non-Personal Data.
The panel suggested creating a new category of businesses called ‘Data Business’ that collects, process, store, or otherwise manages data, and meets certain threshold criteria.
Non-personal data includes community data, anonymized data, artificial intelligence training data, and e-commerce data.The Committee believes that meta-data sharing by Data Business will spur innovation at an unprecedented scale in the country.
The panel has suggested that data can be requested from businesses and government by various stakeholders — the government, citizens, startups, private organizations, and non-profit organizations — for social welfare, regulatory, sovereign, and economic purposes.
Data for sovereign purposes may be requested for national security, legal purpose, or meeting a sectoral regulation requirement.
Data for social welfare will help the government in better delivery of public services.
The draft suggests that the government will have to establish a data-sharing framework, have to encourage data sharing among government and businesses, and incentivize such data partnerships.
It also proposes setting up a Non-Personal Data Authority backed by law to enable and regulate this data sharing. The committee has proposed that data businesses must register with the government if they reach a certain size.
Late last year, the panel held stakeholder consultations and met representatives of technology and healthcare companies such as Uber, Amazon, Microsoft, Snapdeal, Google, and Manipal Hospitals.
The government believes access to non-personal data gives India an economic advantage, helps provide a level playing field to companies, and prevents market distortion.
Members of the committee include Nasscom president Debjani Ghosh, National Informatics Centre director-general Neeta Verma, Avanti Finance chief technology officer Lalitesh Katragadda, Ponnurangam Kumaraguru of IIIT Hyderabad and non-profit organisation IT for Change’s executive director Parminder Jeet Singh.
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