Government to pay companies to obtain non-personal data? A Panel suggests so

A panel looking into the regulation of anonymised data has suggested that the government may have to cough up a 'fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory' amount to obtain certain non-personal data from companies, according to an Economic Times report. On Sunday, the draft was released for public consultation.

The panel is comprised of eminent personalities like 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.

The panel suggested, "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."

It added that a company can choose not to share proprietary knowledge data and algorithms at all and mechanisms to share public, community, and private data need to be established.

The draft also recommended, "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 Non-Personal Data have been divided into three categories. Non-personal data includes community data, anonymised data, artificial intelligence training data, and e-commerce data. The panel believes that metadata sharing by Data Business will spur innovation in the country.

The three sections of Non-Personal data are: a) Public Non-Personal Data b) Community Non-Personal Data and c) Private Non-Personal Data. The formation of a new category of businesses called ‘Data Business’ that collects, processes, stores, or otherwise manages data has also be recommended.

Various stakeholders like the government, citizens, startups, private organisations, and non-profit organisations can request for data, to serve for the following purposes:

Sovereign purposes: For national security, legal purpose, or meeting a sectoral regulation requirement.

Social welfare: This will help the government in better delivery of public services.

Apart from these two, data can be requested for regulatory and economic purposes as well.

It has suggested the government to establish a data-sharing framework, to encourage data sharing among government and businesses, and incentivise such data partnerships. It has also proposed to set up a lawfully aided Non-Personal Data Authority to enable and regulate data sharing. After they reach a certain size data businesses must register with the government.