ISLAMABAD: The Pakistan government is reviewing a draft bill on personal data protection after receiving input from national and international technology and business stakeholders, Federal Minister for Information Technology and Telecommunication Syed Aminul Haque said on Tuesday.
Data protection is being hotly debated in Pakistan, and around the world, after WhatsApp announced new privacy terms under which the company reserves the right to share user data, including location and phone number, with its parent Facebook Inc. and units such as Instagram and Messenger.
Privacy advocates have questioned the move citing Facebook’s track record in handling user data, with many suggesting users to migrate to platforms such as Telegram and Signal.
Pakistan prepared a draft of a personal data protection bill in 2018, but it is yet to be voted into law by parliament.
“We aren’t in a hurry ... we wanted to make the personal data protection law by taking all local and foreign stakeholders into confidence,” Haque told Arab News in an interview.
In June last year, the minister said, the IT ministry had received input on the draft law from all local and foreign stakeholders, including tech and business giants like Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook and LinkedIn, in addition to the US Chamber of Commerce and European Union.
“Point-by-point, section-wise review [of the draft law] is going on in the IT ministry and we will ultimately send it to the law ministry after finalizing it,” he said, adding that the draft law was accessible to the public to ensure transparency.
Haque said the government wanted to enact a law that “protected the data of common people from any misuse.”
About WhatsApp’s new privacy policy, the minister said he had directed the country’s telecom regulator – the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority – to take up the issue with the management of the messaging giant and “ensure that no Pakistani user was going to face any problem due to the new policy.”
As per the draft data protection law, the federal government will establish a Personal Data Protection Authority of Pakistan and impose a fine of up to 25 million rupees on anyone found guilty of a data breach.
Digital rights activists and data experts say the government is delaying the enactment of the personal data protection law since it was not willing to bring data in its numerous public departments within the legal ambit.
“The state holds vast amounts of data and we have seen a lot of breaches of its databases … A lot of sensitive information related to citizens has been leaked and there is very little legal avenue available to citizens for legal recourse,” Usama Khilji, who works with digital rights group Bolo Bhi, told Arab News.
#LISTEN: Sensitive information has been leaked by "a lot of breaches of the state #databases ... and there is very little legal avenue available to citizens for legal recourse," says digital privacy rights activist @UsamaKhilji || @BoloBhi
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Read more: https://t.co/vwhSbHfEbN pic.twitter.com/y9w6wPXGJE— Arab News Pakistan (@arabnewspk) January 13, 2021
He said big corporations and marketing agencies also collected individual data to send unsolicited messages and advertisements, adding that the government should enact a data protection law to hold these companies and its own institutions accountable in case of a breach.
“A very important factor that is missing from the draft law relates to government-held data,” Khilji said. “They don’t want any accountability of the data they hold, but they want to hold citizens and companies accountable.”
