Ah! The subtle art of overreach. Calculating. Quiet. Amidst all the brouhaha, sliding unnoticeably through until it’s revealed. That, in a nutshell, would be the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) in the year 2018; a year when little can (or should) surprise you anymore.
Since its inception, for twenty-one years, Trai has limited itself to the telecom business. Ambling. Regulating. Putting out recommendations. Until July this year, when it decided it wanted more. The body put out its data privacy recommendations to the Department of Telecom (DoT). By referring to mobile devices and applications as faucets to the telecom pipes, it overreached to control whatever faucets do. A super-regulator in the making, perhaps. It prescribed a need for data privacy and security audits across the entire digital ecosystem. And Trai would be the one to monitor it.
Except, there’s a bit of a hitch. Trai is not alone.
The Reserve Bank of India has similar ideas.
As does the Insurance Regulatory Development Authority of India (IRDAI).
The National Housing Bank is also keen.
The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) wants to do the same.
Everyone wants the whole, or, at least, some part of it. And all of this, even as a drafting committee appointed by the Centre is putting together its own data privacy law. One that is supposed to encompass the full scope of data privacy across sectors.
If you’ve heard the analogy too many cooks spoil the broth, this is the living example of it. Except here, the cooks don’t even talk to each other. In the end, though, it is businesses who pay the price.
Because making demands is easy. You know what isn’t? Compliance. Even for the most basic compliance, you need an expert, her expertise and her seal of certification of compliance. All of this already costs a lot of money and time. And now in an interconnected world, with data privacy and security at the heart of most businesses, and a bunch of organisations trying to play regulator without any semblance of direction, it looks like things are going to get worse. Perhaps, we are sitting on the cusp of a new compliance industry in the making. Of course, this is not good news.
The cost of compliance
Let’s start with UIDAI. Early last year, the organisation was getting ready to conduct a security assessment of its ecosystem partners. After a tender process initiated in May 2017, it empanelled the audit firm Deloitte to audit all its ecosystem partners. A fee was decided, and ecosystem partners were told to pay Deloitte for every site audited. Banks protested against this fiat by UIDAI, arguing that they be allowed to appoint their own systems auditors. In the end, UIDAI relented, allowing all its ecosystem partners to appoint auditors empanelled by India’s premier agency dealing with cybersecurity threats—Computer Emergency Response Team or Cert-In.
