The government will propose to allow transfer of data and its storage in “trusted geographies” in the revised draft of the data protection Bill, doing away with the data localisation requirement proposed in the earlier version, people privy to the matter told us.
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After months of consultations and deliberations on various issues such as data localisation, penalties for a data breach, and regulation of non-personal data, the government will do away with the data localisation requirement in the revised draft of the data protection Bill, and propose to allow transfer of data and its storage in “trusted geographies”.
Also in this letter: ■ WhatsApp India head Abhijit Bose quits Meta
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The government will propose to allow transfer of data and its storage in “trusted geographies” in the revised draft of the data protection Bill, doing away with the data localisation requirement proposed in the earlier version, people privy to the matter told us.
The government will define which geographies are “trusted” from time to time in the new draft, which is likely to be released for public consultation this week.
Penalties scrapped: Criminal penalties proposed on employees of companies involved in data breach also will be scrapped. Instead, financial penalties of as much as Rs 200 crore, multiplied by the number of users impacted, will be imposed per breach, an official said. A Data Protection Board will be set up to “adjudicate the consequences of any data breaches” and decide on the penalty, this official added.
The Personal Data Protection (PDP) Bill — the draft of which was withdrawn in August after five years in the making — is being renamed the Digital Data Protection Bill. The revised draft will also drop provisions to regulate non-personal data and social media.
Quote Unquote: “It is a different Bill from the PDP Bill. It deals with digital personal data,” said the official. “It is a qualitatively different approach. It is a much simpler Bill so that it does not become the last word on data protection. It will continue to evolve (with the changing technology).”
Previous contentions: Clauses on criminal penalty, non-personal data and social media regulation along with provision on data localisation were among the most contentious clauses in the old draft. The Bill had seen major pushback from large tech companies as well as Indian startups.
In August, the government withdrew the older version of the Bill, which had 81 suggestions for amendments and another 12 for other tweaks from a joint parliamentary committee that studied the draft for close to two years.
Data Protection Board: There will be a Data Protection Board that will adjudicate the consequences of any data breaches.
The Data Protection Board will decide the penalties for a breach. So, if there are 1,000 people impacted by a very serious breach, the consequence could be as high as Rs 200 crore thousand times, the official said. Amazon India likely to cut staff amid global layoffs
The company – which operates various businesses in India, including ecommerce, data centres under Amazon Web Services, and Prime Video – is expected to sack about 10,000 corporate and technology employees in total, various global media outlets reported on Monday.
How many in India? While the exact number of layoffs in India has not yet been finalised, our sources said the cuts could go ‘deeper’ than a few hundred, given the size of Amazon’s workforce here, estimated at 100,000.
“The retrenchment is happening here (India) and discussions are underway on the numbers,” one of them said.
In May, the local arm of the Seattle-based firm had said it generated a total employment of over 1.1 million, comprising indirect and contract jobs. Amazon India, besides its key offices in Bengaluru, also has employees working from coworking spaces across Indian cities.
An executive working at a recruitment services firm in Bengaluru said hundreds of employees, especially in the shared services, back-office and retail operations, face the threat of being laid off.
Big Tech layoffs: Other Big Tech firms are also trimming their workforces amid a grim macroeconomic environment.
Singapore ecommerce firm Shopee parent also is cutting about 7,000 or 10% of its workforce. Shopee had made an abrupt exit from India in March. ET Ecommerce Index We’ve launched three indices – ET Ecommerce, ET Ecommerce Profitable, and ET Ecommerce Non-Profitable – to track the performance of recently listed tech firms. Here’s how they’ve fared so far.
The company confirmed the development, saying the announcements are "completely unrelated to the recent news cycles” – a reference to the mass layoffs it announced last week.
Changes: Shivnath Thukral, the director of public policy at WhatsApp, will now head the company’s public policy initiatives across all three platforms – WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram – Meta said. Who will replace Bose is still unclear.
Earlier this month, Ajit Mohan, vice president of Meta India, quit the company to join rival social media platform Snap as its head of business for Asia-Pacific.
Bose, who cofounded payments firm Eztap, joined WhatsApp in 2018 and was the first person to be appointed as a country head for the messaging app.
“It's been four years since I joined as WhatsApp's first country head in India, and I'm so proud of what we have built. I'm also really excited about my next gig… After a small break, I plan to rejoin the entrepreneurial world; you’ll see announcements on that shortly!” he wrote. Koo plans to launch in the US, its first market outside India
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Homegrown microblogging platform Koo is harbouring global ambitions. The world is looking for an alternative to Twitter and the app is preparing to fill that void by soon launching in the US, its cofounders told us.
Changes afoot: The company has already started building tools and technology to tweak its India product for a global audience and will shortly begin an outreach aimed at enrolling world leaders and their followers.
It is also building tools that will allow people to not only get a verified handle for free but also import their tweets and followers.
“We want to take Koo to the US, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Malaysia, the Philippines, the Middle East and Africa. We see an opportunity in the non-English markets as well as the English markets as both are not happy with Twitter,” Aprameya Radhakrishna, cofounder and chief executive of Koo, told us.
With 50 million app downloads, Koo is larger than other global microblogging platforms such as Gettr, Truth Social, Mastodon, Parler and Gab, he said.
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On October 20, India’s competition watchdog fined Google Rs 1,337.76 crore for what it termed an abuse of its dominant position in multiple markets through the Android operating system.
The potential economic impact of the metaverse in India could range from $79 to $148 billion a year by 2035, according to a new report by Deloitte. This translates to between 1.3% and 2.4% of the country’s GDP.
With over half of its population under the age of 30, the country produces the highest number of STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) graduates globally. It is demographically well-positioned to contribute digital labour to the metaverse, it said.
The report, titled ‘The Metaverse in Asia – Strategies for accelerating economic impact’, estimated that the impact of the metaverse on Asia’s GDP could be $0.8-1.4 trillion a year by 2035, or roughly 1.3% to 2.4% of the continent’s GDP. Other Top Stories By Our Reporters
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