Episode 0 - Data Privacy with Justice Srikrishna

In this curtain raiser for the first season of Ex Machina: Rahul Matthan interviews Justice Srikrishna on data privacy and much more.

For better or worse, the technology India has been building over the past decade has had and will continue to have tremendous national significance. It’s hard to connect the dots and appreciate the real impact of these technologies on society. Ex Machina places these technologies in context, telling the story about how they were made and explaining exactly why they are so significant.

Justice Srikrishna will likely be remembered most for his work on the data protection committee that he chaired. The draft data protection law that the committee submitted was controversial, introducing new concepts like data localisation into the national consciousness and making the user central to the notion of data protection. But the government, instead of accepting the draft law as he had presented it, tabled before the Parliament a draft that was significantly different.

I sat down with Justice Srikrishna to go over the draft that was placed before Parliament to try and understand how it differs from his vision of what the privacy law of this country should look like.

Additional Reading:

1. The Report of the Data Protection Committee

2. The Personal Data Protection Bill, 2019 as tabled before Parliament

Thanks to Justice Srikrishna for the interview.