Kris Gopalakrishnan Committee On Non-personal Data

• 17 Jul 2020

• A government committee headed by Infosys co-founder Kris Gopalakrishnan has suggested that non-personal data generated in the country be allowed to be harnessed by various domestic companies and entities. The nine-member committee, while releasing the draft report, has kept time till August 13 for the public to send suggestions.
• It has also suggested setting up of a new authority which would be empowered to monitor the use and mining of such non-personal data.

What is non-personal data?

• In its most basic form, non-personal data is any set of data which does not contain personally identifiable information. This in essence means that no individual or living person can be identified by looking at such data.
• The government committee, which submitted its report has classified non-personal data into three main categories:
• Public Non-Personal Data: All the data collected by government and its agencies such as census, data collected by municipal corporations on the total tax receipts in a particular period or any information collected during execution of all publicly funded works has been kept under the umbrella of public non-personal data.
• Community Non-Personal Data:Any data identifiers about a set of people who have either the same geographic location, religion, job, or other common social interests will form the community non-personal data. For example, the metadata collected by ride-hailing apps, telecom companies, electricity distribution companies among others have been put under the community non-personal data category by the committee.
• Private Non-Personal Data: It can be defined as those which are produced by individuals which can be derived from application of proprietary software or knowledge.