General Data Protection Regulation

General Data Protection Regulation

Subject: Science and technology

Context: The Minister of State for Electronics and IT – said that the future of Internet regulation will need a harmonisation between the democracies of the world and India may not follow Europe on data protection.

EU’s General Data Protection Regulation:

• It will apply to all users in the EU, regardless of where the companies collecting, analyzing and using their data are located.
• Companies based in the EU have to offer these privacy protections to all their users, not just EU residents.
• Companies have to use plain language to explain how they collect and use data.
• It lays six specific ways that companies can justify the processing or use of personal data. 
  • To fulfill contractual obligations,legitimate interests, ad targeting etc
• Firms have to clarify how long they retain data.
  • Companies are also required to give EU users the ability to access and delete data and to object to data use under one of the claimed reasons.
• In case of data breaches companies will have to disclose it within 72 hours.

Bot:

• A bot — short for robot and also called an internet bot
• It  is a computer program that operates as an agent for a user or other program or to simulate a human activity.
• Bots are normally used to automate certain tasks, meaning they can run without specific instructions from humans.
• An organization or individual can use a bot to replace a repetitive task that a human would otherwise have to perform. Bots are also much faster at these tasks than humans.
• Although bots can carry out useful functions, they can also be malicious and come in the form of malware.
• Some of the examples are Siri and Cortana, Microsoft’s Clippy and AOL Instant Messenger’s SmarterChild.
• Bots are made from sets of algorithms that aid them in their designated tasks. These tasks include conversing with a human — which attempts to mimic human behaviors — or gathering content from other websites.

Types of bots

• Chatbots-These programs can simulate conversations with a human being.
  • Recent examples of chatbots include virtual assistants, such as Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri and Google Assistant.
• Social bots-These bots, often considered opinion bots, influence discussions with users on social media platforms.
• Shopbots-Many of these programs shop around the web and locate the best price for a product a user is interested in buying.
• Knowbots-These programs collect knowledge for a user by automatically visiting websites to retrieve information that meets certain specified criteria
• Spiders or crawlers/ web crawlers-these bots access websites and gather content for indexes in search engines, such as Google and Bing.
• Web scraping crawlers-These are similar to crawlers but are used for data harvesting and extracting relevant content from webpages.
• Monitoring bots-These can be used to monitor the health of a website or system.
• Transactional bots-These bots are designed to simplify tasks that would otherwise be performed by a human over the phone, such as blocking a stolen credit card or confirming a bank’s hours of operation.
• Bots can also be classified as good bots or bad bots — in other words, bots that do not cause any harm versus bots that pose threats.