New Lock For EU's Digital Mines

Indian companies dealing with European data wait ­anxiously as the EU pushes in new security rules

- Arindam Mukherjee

PRETTY soon, Indian companies, especially those associated with European companies, will have to walk that extra mile to protect personal data. Come May 25, the European Union (EU) will enact a new set of regulations, called the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which will impose stringent conditions for personal data protection and privacy laws.

What’s more, any violation of or non-compliance with the new regulations will ­attract the strictest of penalties and fines. On an ­average, the new regulations call for up to 4 percent of a company’s global revenue as penalty.

With the already huge and rapidly ­expanding field of big data play across companies and industries, data protection has come under the limelight and many countries are talking in terms of putting in place stringent rules for personal data protection. The EU will be the first off the block with GDPR, which comes into effect in less than three months. It is expected that following the EU’s ­example, similar regulations will start coming up in other countries as well.

The GDPR will replace the 1995 Data Protection Directive currently operational in the EU and its regulations will cover all EU member states and citizens. Accordingly, all companies operating in the EU and having customers there, or even having work outsourced from the EU which involves its citizens’ personal data, will have to fall in line and comply.

The rules under GDPR will be relevant for businesses collecting, processing, storing, and sharing data of EU data subjects. This would include all businesses located in India providing services ­directly or indirectly to EU data subjects, as well as Indian companies with a ­pre­sence in Europe.