MeitY reaches out to stakeholders for feedback on ecommerce biz data

The ministry of electronics and information technology (MeitY) has reached out to a select group of stakeholders for comments on aspects of storage and anonymizing ecommerce business data and its inclusion in the Personal Data Protection Bill.

Guidelines on the collection, storage and processing of ecommerce data was previously a part of the draft national ecommerce policy.

In June, commerce and industry minister Piyush Goyal had said the aspects of business data related to ecommerce will be handled by MeitY. 

Sources told TechCircle the consultation with select stakeholders was aimed at discussing whether data collected by ecommerce companies can be shared with group companies and processed outside of India.

Some of the questions the ministry has sought feedback on include:

• What could be the contours of a policy that should govern non-personal data such as community data, anonymized data, ecommerce data?
• Could there be a case for mandating free access to such non-personal data such as community data, anonymized data, ecommerce data?
• Should the Data Protection Authority also be the regulator in respect of all non-personal data?

Medianama reported that MeitY had confirmed reaching out to select stakeholders, seeking responses by August 25 on the issues. It also shared a similar list of questions asked by MeitY.

In its submissions for the draft national ecommerce policy to department for promotion of industry and internal trade during a stakeholders’ meeting, online citizens forum LocalCircles had recommended that there was a need to keep ecommerce policy and business data policy separate.  

“LocalCircles was the first one to raise the need for a separate ecommerce and business data policy in February 2019,” said Sachin Taparia, founder of LocalCircles.  “It makes sense for MeitY to modify Personal Data Protection Bill and include business data aspects there, applicable to all sectors and not just ecommerce.”