Eye on private firms, govt may define ‘ownership’ of non-personal data

Subject: Science and Technology

Section: Biology

Context:

The draft framework, announced by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MEITY) in May, looks at acquiring non-personal data from the Government and persuading private companies to share this data for the benefit of start-ups in the country.
THE GOVERNMENT could look at clearly defining “ownership” of non-personal data held by big-tech platforms, such as Google, Meta and Amazon, if they refuse to share such data with a regulator as proposed in the draft National Data Governance Framework.
The draft also proposes the setting up of an India Data Management Office (IDMO), which will be in charge of designing and managing the platform that will process requests and provide access to non-personal datasets for Indian researchers and start-ups, and act as the sector’s regulator.

Non-personal Data

Non-personal data is any data set that does not contain personally identifiable information.
It could include aggregated information, such as the overall health data of a particular demography, weather and climate data of an area, and traffic data, among
The idea of harnessing economic benefits from aggregated non-personal datasets was first proposed by a MEITY-appointed committee headed by Infosys co-founder Kris Gopalakrishnan.
the committee recommended the identification of certain “high value datasets”, which could be shared for the purpose of encouraging innovation and ensuring national security.