Government may turn off ‘continuous consent’ for apps in data bill

economictimes.indiatimes.com:

consent from their users every time they change the terms and conditions, update their services and change the way user data is processed, sources in the know of the development told ET. A clause to this effect may be introduced in the Digital India Bill, the draft of which is to be released soon for public consultation, officials said.

This would do away with the concept of ‘continuous consent’ where apps and services obtain permissions to process data from the users initially when the user signs up for the service and then continue to process the datasets based on the initial consent, a senior government official said. “The current process is unfair to the user because companies keep changing the way they process data collected from the users when they sign up for the service.

A user must be aware at all times how their data is processed,” the official said.Also read | Digital India Bill draft bill likely to open for public consultation within 15 days In a draft of the Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Bill, the government has mandated that the personal data of a user, also called data principal, must be processed only for purposes for which the consent has been obtained or the consent is ‘deemed’ to have been obtained. All such notices mandate that requests for processing of data should be accompanied by or preceded by “an itemised notice” containing the description of the personal data being collected and the ways in which the data can be used.

Such notices, according to the draft DPDP Bill, must be in “clear and plain language”. In the draft of the bill, the government has also proposed that in cases where the personal data of users have been collected before the implementation of the Act, the data fiduciaries