Following protests by opposition parties, rights groups and businesses, the Indian government has withdrawn its proposed Data Protection Bill. The draft bill received 81 amendment suggestions at the joint parliamentary committee. Reports suggest that the government is now considering bringing in a fresh bill, taking into consideration all the suggestions that came through the parliamentary committee.  While the government in India has listened to the opposition, in Bangladesh, the government has brushed aside the civil societies’ concerns about a similar bill and published the third draft with further expansion of authoritative controls over personal data and privacy.  In India, the bill had been sent to the parliamentary panel in 2019 after opposition parties said the data privacy law violated fundamental rights of the citizens. They said the law gave sweeping powers to the government to access personal data of individuals under opaque conditions citing national security and ...

  The recent publications of the drafts of two long-awaited legislations on regulating usage of internet have stoked some debate on the likely impact of those on citizens and businesses. However, not much has been said about the government’s motivation and objectives behind the sudden rush in legislating these laws, which should have been enacted years ago. Both of these draft laws - the Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC) Regulation for Digital, Social Media and OTT Platforms, 2021 and the Data Protection Act, 2022 - have a common principle, which is to allow the government ever more control on everything we do over the internet. Hence, the draft OTT regulations have more provisions to allow state surveillance over contents on the ground of security of the state, instead of giving freedom to citizens to enjoy cyberspace without fear. Similarly, instead of affording greater protection to an individual’s privacy rights, many of the proposals under the draft dat...

In an era when civil and political rights have been shrinking gradually, we have witnessed a welcome intervention by the Supreme Court. A 3-member bench of the High Court Division of the Supreme Court has said the practice of collection of call list/audio discussion from public/private phone companies without any formal requisition and formal seizure, and also without the knowledge of the subscriber must be stopped. Three justices of the bench, unanimously and without any ambiguity, have said the citizens’ right to privacy in correspondence and other means of communication is guaranteed under article 43 of the Constitution which cannot be easily violated at the whims of any interested quarter.   The judgement was the outcome of a death reference and two appeals one criminal and the other a jail appeal in a case of the killing of a seven-year old child. In the original criminal case, the prosecution significantly relied on the alleged suspects’ call lists and records, which wer...