Govt Of India to allow tech companies like Facebook, Google, Amazon to sell users public data

The Government of India is planning to make it mandatory for the tech companies like, “Facebook, Google, Amazon, and others, to sell public or non-personal data’s they collected on their platform to anyone in the country seeking to access to it including government and private entities.”

Quoting to the official familiar with the matter, the Economics Times reported that, “The Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY) is considering issuing guidelines under the Information Technology Act. Which will require the agencies and the agencies to share freely available information which they collected on their platform, including traffic, buying, and illness patterns.”

“But a final decision on this will be taken only after an “Exhaustive” consultation process,” the reported added.

“We have to keep in mind that, it was the big tech companies who came up with the idea and did the work like in critical medicines, to which they have a right to charge an economical fee for sharing it,” the official added.

The official also told the ET that, “Earlier, the company like Google use to take the users consent before allowing them access to a service to which there was no alternative offered. But now, we want to correct this information asymmetry to ensure that there is healthy competition for all.”

UNCTAD in its recent report on digital economy said that “The companies like Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and China’s Tencent and Alibaba also known as” Super Seven “companies, holds the two-thirds of the total data market by the value.”

“Where, Google has 90% of the internet search market. Following Facebook, which holds two-thirds of the global social media market and its top social media platform is in more than 90% of the world’s economy. Amazon almost has a 40% share of the world’s online retail activities, and its AWS accounts the similar share in the cloud business,” the report said.

The official further added, “The changes in the proposal have taken shape due to the increasing pressure, and concern form several bureau’s, government administrators, and other stakeholders in India who are waiting to address the public data as the major priority.”