Tired of tele-marketing calls? Act on privacy right: Experts
Annoyed with unsolicited calls from insurance and banking companies? Under the proposed Right to Privacy Act, such calls would be considered a violation and the company responsible penalised up to Rs 5 lakh. The draft Right to Privacy Bill says that no person with a business in the country can collect or disclose any data relating to any individual without his/her consent.
Doing so will be a punishable offence. Speakers at a seminar here on Saturday organised by the Citizen consumer and civic Action Group (CAG), were unanimous in their call for the Right to Privacy Act coming into force soon. R Revathi, an associate professor at Dr Ambedkar Law University, said the matter of privacy was very tricky. "Recently, a man who came to donate blood for a friend tested positive for HIV. The hospital got to know he was going to be engaged soon and told his fiance? after which the marriage was called off," she said. "The man was not a patient at the hospital but his personal information was made public in the interest of a larger good. These are some of the challenges expected while implementing the bill," she added.
Others said there was no specific law in the Constitution to safeguard the individual's privacy. Privacy, they said, could be classified into physical and informational privacy. While the former was about the intrusion of physical space, the latter included digital and non-digital data that is personal in nature.
The article was published by the Times of India on August 7, 2011. The original can be read here
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