Policing The Privacy Laws

It is going to take a while for the Indian software firms with businesses in the EU to come to speed with the data protection norms laid out by the GDPR

- Sanjay Thapa Jeet

WHEN MARK ZUCKERBERG was asked by Senator Chuck Grassley in the Capitol Hill testimony on 9 April on Cambridge Analytica (CA) controversy on whether Facebook prised open individual messages, CEO Mark Zuckerberg fumbled, sipped water! Grassely repeated the question. Finally Zuckerberg admitted, “Yes… we tap audio of the video uploaded! So that the data can be sent to advertisers. We sell data and that’s our business model.” he said.

By the time this story goes to press, GDPR EU 2016/279 – General Data Protection Regulations – scheduled to be live on 25 May – would have come into effect. The stringent and comprehensive data privacy diktat is bound to knock the wind out of many cyber operators (Read: data miners) around the world.

So, why is GDPR under the spotlight world over? Well, under the GDPR EU 2016/279 guidelines, citizens and organisations of EU would get to retain and exercise their right to data privacy. On the anvil are stricter international business norms through ePrivacy as well as NIS directive on cybersecurity. And compliance is a heavily loaded word in the world of GDPR. Here’s why. Any data breach or violation of the laws would attract a penalty imposition by as much 4 per cent of the global revenue of the company or Euros 20 million, whichever is higher for high risk breaches and 2 per cent or Euros 10 million for low risk breaches.