Final Draft Of Personal Data Protection Bill To Be Tabled Before Parliament May Retain Exemptions For Journalists

The final draft of the Personal Data Protection Bill, which is to be tabled in Parliament soon, is likely to retain exemptions for journalists, as suggested by the Justice B N Srikrishna panel.

These exemptions would provide them the freedom to write news reports or opinion pieces which might contain “sensitive personal data”.

However, journalists will have to comply with the code of ethics as laid down by the Press Council of India or “any media self-regulatory organization,” according to the draft of the Bill.

Journalists would often need to collect information about people from third parties, for bona fide purposes in the course of their work—for instance to validate off-the-record information or the authenticity of a document which might have been seen by other people.

If all the provisions of the Bill were to be applied, it would become impossible for journalists, especially investigative journalists, to comply and still do their work.

For instance, if the need for ‘explicit consent’ of a data principal is applied, it would hinder the work of journalists.

In order to avoid such a situation, Section 47 (Journalistic Purposes) has exempted the need to comply with purpose limitation — the mandate to process information only for the purpose it was originally collected for.

This is because journalists often have to source data which may not be published as part of their report.

In addition to this, the government has indicated that the Bill would also include exemptions for processing data without an individual’s consent for “reasonable purposes,” including security of the state, detection of unlawful activity or fraud, whistleblowing, medical emergencies, credit scoring, operation of search engines, as well as processing of publicly available data.