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TransUnion is a well known company in India. This company silently acquired 92% of the shares of CIBIL which was earlier held by many Banks in CIBIL.

The mystery of this acquisition in which a company owned by several public sector banks by a US based private sector company is a matter of case study. No Sucheta Dalal nor Subramanya Swamy got wind of this acquisition and press and media including Mr Arnab Goswami were in the dark.

In the process, TransUnion CIBIL became the controller of sensitive personal data of 1000 million Indians. The sensitive data consisted of demographic data, financial data and profiling data leading to personal credit rating. The personal credit rating is used by many Fintech companies for automated decision making for decisions on lending, fixing of limits on credit cards etc.

The value of such data which continues to grow and bring in revenue to TransUnion CIBIL is worth exploring.

If we take the dark web value index 2021 as a base these data sets are valued not less than $25 per data set to perhaps even $200 and over. Unfortunately the share holders of these Banks (SBI, Union Bank, IOB, etc) represented in the  diagram showing the share holding pattern in 2001,  never came to know of this lucrative buy out and the watch dog SEBI perhaps also missed its duty to ensure that the minority share holders got their dues. All this perhaps was technically well executed within the law since the only organization which was in the know of the things at that time was the RBI and the Finance Ministry during the last days of P Chidambaram and the early days of Arun Jaitely.

Now an interesting case has come to light in USA where a class action suit filed against the Company for damages of around $40 million has reached the Supreme Court.  The suit was prompted by an incident when a dealer of Nissan automobile was checked for his credit rating using TransUnion in which the report noted that the name of the dealer appeared to partially match two names included in the Federal Government list of people barred from conducting business in US because of national security concerns.

The report had wrongly identified the dealer with some terrorist names ( A similar incident had once identified a major fraud in a Bangladesh Central Bank in the SWIFT system). 8184 others had joined with the dealer and launched a class action suit against TransUnion out of which similar data of 1853 had been released by TransUnion earlier.  Indirectly these 1853 persons were flagged as terror suspects.

A lower court had determined a $40 million damage which was on appeal at the Supreme Court.  The Supreme Court (in a 5-4 ruling) appears to be considering lowering of the damage since not all 8185 of the participants of the class action suit had suffered the real damage like the 1853 persons.

See the full judgement here

The final decision of the Supreme Court will determine the “Value of Damage” caused by a wrong profiling of a data subject. It would be interesting for us to watch the final outcome.

This case could provide a guidance to valuation of damage caused by a wrongful handling of personal data profiling and disclosure and could be a precedence that we may all refer from time to time.

Naavi

Also Refer:

amisuccess.in

CBI Enquiry is required for finding the truth behind TransUnion taking over CIBIL

Is TransUnion-CIBIL guilty of Accessing Critical Personal Data through surreptitious means?

Data is making news in India and elsewhere for various reasons. In India discussion is going on on Personal Data Protection Bill 2019 (PDPB2019) on whether the Bill will introduced in the Parliament in the monsoon session or not.

Dogecoin co-founder has created a global stir stating that Crypto Currencies like Bitcoin are a “Scam”.

Elsewhere organizations like FDPPI are shouting that Value of Data has to be visible in the Balance sheets.

On the horizon lurks the proposed “Non Personal Data Governance Act” in India which may define a new business called “Data Business” and enable even manufacturing companies to come up with a “Data Monetization Plan” to boost their revenue.

The manufacturing industry on the other hand is trying to transform their production system to “Industry 4.0” framework where data drives production. 3D printing has the potential to change the entire manufacturing sector.

Quantum computing says that Data can simultaneously exist in different forms (Super positioning) and can be twisted from remote location (entanglement) to change data values raising questions on the information security technology as is prevalent today.

In the midst of all these discussions, Business is pursuing the question of how to leverage data in making better business decisions. This is the thrust to creating “Data Driven Organizations”. Most of the IT Companies consider this “Digital Transformation” as the future of their business marketing profile.

In this context, Techmedia plus is organizing a webinar during the CXO Tech Summit 2021 on “Building a data-driven organization” to discuss the trends and challenges in building a data-driven organization.

While “Data” is a key driver of business in all IT Companies, the role of data in manufacturing sector leading to Industry 4.0 scenario requires an in depth debate. With India proposing to get into a legal regime for monetizing Non Personal Data, there is a need to ensure that an awareness is built in the industry on how to leverage data for better decision making in the business. The restrictions on the use of Personal Data places a premium on technologies like “Anonymization” that converts personal data to “Non Personal Data” so that the Data Analytics industry can harness the benefits of data. At the same time with increasing cyber threats, “Security” continues to be a concern for data availability, data reliability and data confidentiality.

One of the reasons that corporates are unable to allocate sufficient attention to data management for business is that the top managers of a company donot have a clear visibility of the value of data which is in their custody. Only when hackers remind them from time to time with ransomware attacks, do corporates realize that they have millions of dollars worth data in their custody. It is therefore time that we try to bring better visibility to data as an asset in the hands of a company. It is notable that FDPPI (Foundation of Data Protection Professionals in India) which is often referred to as the “Dada of Data Protection in India” has taken steps to suggest that bringing data value into balance sheets is one of the suggested controls in the PDPSI (Personal Data Protection Standard of India) framework for evaluation of PDP-CMS (Personal Data Protection Compliance Management System) system and calculation of the DTS (Data Trust Score).

Naavi is slated to speak to Data Valuers in Bangalore on Saturday on data valuation and lead a panel discussion on building a data driven organization in the CXO summit 2021 on August 18, 2021.

Look forward to interesting discussions with experts in the industry on both topics.

Naavi

Naavi.org ahs been running a sustained campaign advocating a ban on Crypto Currencies (Privately created and managed, like Bitcoin) in India. Time and again it has been pointed out that

1.Cryto currencies are the currencies of the criminals and cyber crimes can be brought down if Crypto currencies are banned

2.Crypto currencies represent “Digital Black Money” and Modi’s Demonetization and elimination of Black money will be meaningless without banning of Crypto currencies

3.India can take a global leadership stance by banning Crypto currencies and campaigning for other countries to do the same.

4. Mining of Cryptos is a huge burden on the electrical consumption in the country and is unproductive

5. Release of Cryptos into the legit monetary system will create a tsunami in inflation

6.Legitimization of Cryptos will help China and Pakistan to meddle with Indian economy and money supply.

7.Legitimization of Cryptos will assist funding of terrorists and Naxalites in India

So far there is no support from a large section of bureaucrats on the proposal. Despite RBI trying to place a ban, the Finance Ministry is stalling the idea. The Supreme Court gave a strange decision based on technicalities that was meant to support delay in the banning of cryptos.

Now I bring to the attention of the Supreme Court as well as the Ministry of Finance and Ministry of Electronics and IT that the co-founder of Dogecoin with a market capitalization of over $24 billion has released a series of tweets reproduced below which needs to be taken note of by Mr Rajiv Chandrashekar and Mr  Ashwini Vaishnav who have assumed charge as ministers in the Meity.

Refer article here

Do we need a better endorsement for banning of Crypto currencies in India?

Naavi

The Monsoon session of the Parliament is expected to take place between July 19th and August 13. Some information on the bills likely to be discussed have appeared in the media

It does not appear that the two key bills which were scheduled to be lead by the MeitY, namely the  Personal Data Protection Bill 2019 and the Banning of the Crypto Currency Bill may not be discussed in this session also.

We may ignore the reasons that are appearing in the press about the Chairman of JPC becoming a minister or that the Crypto bill still needs fine tuning. These are excuses to defer the passage of the bills since there are powerful lobbies which donot want these bills to be passed.

Data driven companies want more time to complete their data laundering business and Criminals want as much time as possible to convert their black money into crypto currencies.

It requires strong willed politicians and bureaucrats to push the bill. Mr R S Prasad made a statement that he would push the passage of PDPB 2019 which cost him the minister ship itself.  The Crypto bill is in the hands of Mrs Nirmala Sitharaman who wants to avoid upsetting the powerful lobbies who want the digital black money to be available for all their nefarious activities.

We hope that there will not be  another major data catastrophe and a ransom ware attack on a Government body to make the Government realize how important are these two legislations.

Naavi

We congratulate the team at Root64 which in association with the420.in has created a centralized online database of Nodal Officers /Contacts of various intermediaries and service providers.

You can find any Nodal Officer connect through this search engine under the following link.

Find Nodal Officers

We congratulate Mr Amit Dubey, the Chief mentor of Root64 foundation.

Naavi

One of the major changes that we notice in the Modi cabinet announced on 7th July 2o21 is that Mr Ashwin Vaishnav, has taken over  as the new Minister of IT in place of Mr Ravishankar Prasad. He will be holding the IT ministry along with the heavy weight Railway ministry. Even in the earlier ministry, IT had been clubbed with Law but Law was relatively a lower weight portfolio compared to Railways. Now Mr Kiren Rijiju will be exclusively in charge of Law and Justice.

We may note that Mrs Meenakshi Lekhi who headed the Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC)  on Personal Data Protection Bill 2019 has been appointed the Minister of State  in the Ministry of External Affairs; and Minister of State in the Ministry of Culture. Mr  Rajeev Chandrashekar who was also in the JPC and a known IT aware person gets Minister of State in the Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship; and Minister of State in the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology.

The Ministry of I&B will also have a new face in Mr Anurag Thakur and it is significant that Mr Prakash Javdekar has vacated the ministry.

Our best wishes to all the new ministers.

However, the developments clearly show that Twitter and WhatsApp have won the battle against “Data Sovereignty” for the time being. The removal of both Ravishankar Prasad and Javdekar simultaneously and the allocation of portfolios indicate that the influence of the Twitter-Facebook lobby has ensured that all known faces that were taking a tough stand against the hegemony of the Social media giants have been ousted.

We donot know if the new ministers will be lenient on the principles of Data Sovereignty, Data Protection, Cyber Security etc which were in active discussion in the last few months. We need to wait and see the new policy statements from the incumbent ministers to understand how the scenario unfolds.

India had one global leadership opportunity in the field of IT and it appears that it has not been nurtured. Had a separate ministry been created for IT and Telecom, thrust could have been given for IT in industry with AI, BigData, 3D printing, Robotics, Industry 4.0, Hardware development, Indigenous OS development, Indigenous social media platforms, regulation of Mobile Apps and Gaming  etc., which required close attention.

The opportunity has been squarely missed. The IT therefore has an apparent setback.

The silver lining however is that Mr Ashwin is an MTech from IIT Kanpur and an MBA from Wharton University. Though his experience appears to be more in the manufacturing sector, one can expect that he would be able to bring forth his vast management experience into the discharge of his responsibilities as Minister of IT. It may however require a little time for him to adapt to the requirements of the IT ministry. This could put many of the projects under the IT ministry in the back burner and delay the developments.

Mr Rajeev Chandrashekar being the MOS in MeitY is another silver line and if he can assume stronger  role in the affairs of the ministry, we can expect that there could be continuity in some of the policies related to Data Protection. At least in Rajeev Chandrashekar, we can expect a person who understands IT to the core. He was a successful IT entrepreneur, has an in depth understanding of  technology and has been a member of the JPC as well. He is therefore the hope of Indian IT for the time being. We wish that under Mr Rajeev Chandrashekar, MeitY will be groomed to be an independent ministry in future, as IT is an all pervasive tool that can transform India into a real global giant.

It is time however to hope for the best  and wait.

Naavi