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The Government of India has released the draft Digital Personal Data Protection Bill 2022 for public comments.

The Ministry has invited feedback from the public on the draft Bill. The submissions will not be disclosed and held in fiduciary capacity, to enable persons submitting feedback to provide the same freely. No public disclosure of the submissions will be made.

The feedback on the draft bill in a chapter wise manner may be submitted here

The last date for submission is December 17, 2022

Copy of the Bill is available here

Copy of the explanatory Note is available here

Naavi

• (Continued from the previous article)

In the previous article,  we discussed the Oculus and how it is reportedly been designed to cause damage to the human brain. The device is fortunately not yet out in the market and Mr Palmer Luckey no longer works in Meta. But he has how own company and could very well develop this VR set on his own.

While Mr Palmer boasts that he is “Fascinated” by the possibility of bringing the Meta Verse person closer to the real person, if it is to cause damage to the physical person, then the idea is sinister.

To many this is very scary …so scary that they would like to keep themselves away from any VR. Who knows that there is no hidden explosive charge inside which can be triggered by an event in a Meta Verse event?

While people like us may like to push for the laws to control such devices, the public may be also worried that since VRs may be used by many children, the device can be used to cyber hypnotize the users to reveal financial details of their parents or other secrets with which another criminal attack can be launched on the person.

We cannot wish away that this is only a speculation. If people ccoudl create games like the Blue Whale to make children commit suicide, they will definitely use the VR to exploit the immersive experience to Cyber hypnotize the subject and steal information leading to further crimes.

I am also anticipating that terrorists would use it to brainwash members from the public and motivate them for lone wolf attacks.

If we watch the above video and read some of the comments, it is clear that there are many who seem to enjoy this kind of a device. They may be commenting in jest but the possibility that some of them could become agents of a kingpin is plausible.

In view of the above, I trust that Government of India will immediately place all VR sets under a system of “Licensing” based on a critical evaluation of the hardware at code level. The Meta Verse sites that could interact with the users of this kind of advanced VR sets should also be monitored on a continuous basis to ensure that there are no deep web sites that cause an “Immersive” experience to create criminals prowling in the society.

Time to act now…. Address a communication to the Indian Government to take note of this danger.

Naavi

Also Refer:

About Nervergear

I have been carrying on a crusade against Private Crypto Currencies such as Bitcoin for years and if anybody can say FTX crash was natural, I have the right to say so.

Money Control today carried an article titled “FTX Collapse: RBI has the last laugh on crypto. If you ignored Das’s warnings, the joke is on you”

I would like Money Control to also refer to the many articles in Naavi.org where I have called out even Money Control for promoting Bitcoins in the past.

See all the articles here

In my scathing attack , I have not spared any body including the media and Supreme Court.

Even today I consider Supreme Court as one of the biggest culprits for having blessed Bitcoins for reasons which only can be surmised.

One has to read this unique judgement to understand how a clever judgement can be written stating that one side wins but the other side takes the benefit. This “Bollywood Judgement” is a museum piece of a judgement which is written like a Bollywood script with heros , villains and climax etc.

In this case where a petitioner who was a Crypto Exchange challenged the decision of the Bank to freeze the account based on the RBI circular, the Court ordered that

“RBI is obliged to direct the Central Bank of India to defreeze the account and release the funds of the petitioner together with interest at the rate applicable.”

The consequences of this judgement was terrible. Technically the Supreme Court may justify its action. But morally it gave a clean chit to the operations of the Crypto Exchanges and painted RBI as in the wrong. Since then the transactions of Bitcoin increased and many more Indian investors were caught by the bug.

The Finance Ministry right from the days of Late Mr Arun Jaitely to the current day have been in favour of Bitcoin. The MCX went to the extent of publicly supporting Bitcoin to be included in the commodity trading and had I not called out their nefarious decision aloud, they would have colluded with the finance ministry and given a commodity status to Bitcoin by this time.

It was only the resistance of RBI and frequent warnings by Mr Shakti Kant Das which held back a decision in this regard. Even now there is an attempt to sneak in the Bitcoin (and other private crypto currencies) through the amended Data Protection Law or ITA 2000. But FTX incident should put a check on this attempt.

The CBDC introduced by RBI is for a different purpose and does not amount to validation of the Crypto Currencies like Bitcoins. It may make it even more difficult for the Bit Coin lovers to get a legal approval for the “Currency of the criminals and the corrupt”

I therefore consider that the FTX incident is a welcome development that prevents more damage to our economy through the crypto currencies. While I regret the loss suffered by the innocent investors, they should have seen it coming since the entire eco system of Bitcoins was created and run by criminally minded persons who were fugitives of taxation law in their respective countries.

I had participated in the first Bitcoin conference in India and was enamoured by the technology and even stated that legally it can be acceptable in India through the ITA 2000. Even some RBI officials were present during the conference as observers.  But when I tried to reason with the Bitcoin syndicate that they should align with a law compliant system, I found out that they had no intentions of working within the legal environment and it was thereafter that I started my crusade against Bitcoin.

Our war against Private Cryptos is not over until the Government comes up with a suitable legal provision to declare transactions related to Private Crypto Currencies as “Money Laundering” and start taking penal action. Now we will only be going with the presumption that Bitcoin is not legal but what we need is  to treat it as a punishable crime to deal with or promote private crypto currencies in any form. Work on this is pending.

Naavi

(PS: The device picture shown above is a conceptual replica. It was not actually built and Mr Palmer was perhaps terminated by Meta for other reasons and not for developing this lethal idea.. But the danger of the concept seems plausible and could be built by others)

It is surprising how some criminal minds work. When I urged the need for Neuro Rights legislation in India during his speech at the IDPS 2022, the  existence  of  a concept like Oculus VR set with a possible Microwave blast  was not highlighted.  I only highlighted the developments of Neuro Technology such as Brain Implants and Brain Computer Interfaces that can be misused by the operators to unauthorizedly alter the human mind by manipulating the neuro data.

Mr Palmer Luckey who is identified as an “Entrepreneur” by the Wikipedia is associated with a potential invention of a VR set which can have an embedded Microwave bomb that gets triggered when the wearer is playing a video game and get killed. The Microwave blast would be directed at the brain of the head set wearer killing him in physical life.

Law makers need to seriously think if this technology development is not stopped right now, will it not be a facilitation of  plain “Murder” or “Abatement to suicide”?

If so, it is time to endorse the need for Neuro rights legislation in India now.

The basic requirement of law is

a) Recognize the form of “Neuro Data” as a kind of data coming under “Protected data” 

b) Recognize “Neuro privacy” as a kind of “Protected right”

c) Recognize “harm” due to neurological manipulations

c) Recognized a higher level of “Consent” called “Witnessed Consent” to protect Neuro right

The rest of the law related to penalties and punishments can be considered under other provisions of the data protection act as well as ITA 2000 and IPC as a “Contravention of law”.  The Oculus must me considered as a weapon of death and its inventor and distributor should be punishable under law including punishment of death for third degree murder or attempt thereof.

Considering the urgent need for legislative protection, apart from using other provisions under the “Gaming Control Notification” that the Government is considering, the law on Personal Data Protection, a draft of which is expected to be released anytime must include provisions of Neuro Rights Protection.

Some of the suggested provisions are as follows.

1.“Neuro Data” may be defined as- “Neuro data means the electromagnetic signals that are collected from or fed into the human brain by a Brain Computer Interface in binary form.”

2.“Neuro Privacy” may be defined as- “Neuro Privacy” means the choice of an individual to determine to what extent the individual may share his neuro space with others”

3.“Neurological harm”  may be defined as – Neurological manipulation which alters the ability of an individual to take autonomous decisions” should be added to the definition of harm to extend the “psychological manipulations”

4.“Witnessed Consent” may be defined as-  consent provided by a data principal which is witnessed by independent third parties who donot have conflicting interest in the processing of the personal data under circumstances that the data principal may not be reasonably expected to provide a free consent, and includes sharing of neuro data or sharing of personal data when the data principal is not in a medical condition to provide informed consent.”

I would urge readers to read the series of articles on the suggestions for the new data protection law available at here.

Readers  can  also  view  the  keynote  address  of  naavi  at   IDPS 2022 which is available below.

I request viewers to send their views on whether the time has come to bring Neuro Rights into the Indian law in the current “Draft Digital Personal Data Protection Bill” that the Government is now contemplating.

Please join your voice here so that when FDPPI submits its request to the Government to add these provisions into the draft, your voice will also be heard.

Naavi

Reference:

India Today article

Through separate Gazette Notifications, Government of India has declared three more Banks namely Bank of Baroda, Union Bank of India and Punjab National Bank as “Protected Systems” under Section 70 of ITA 2000.

They join ICICI Bank and HDFC Bank declared earlier .

The corresponding notifications are available here.

Naavi

The introduction of CBDC (Central Bank Digital Currency) by RBI has been perplexing to many.

The reason is that India has developed a functional system of virtual currency system with mobile payments. For all practical purpose, “Mobile” is our digital wallet and we make both small retail payments and large RTGS payments just through our handheld device.

Despite the concern of security through viruses and phishing, the system appears to be running more smoothly than any other country in the world could think of. Hence the need for CBDC is itself perplexing.

CBDC is going to be issued directly by RBI as identifiable tokenized secure electronic documents from a secure server. Each token will be identifiable with a serial number and distributed to the Bankers who may there after distribute it to the retail market.

In this system there is no “Mining” and also there is no possibility of any premium like what Bitcoin type of Crypto’s are generating today. It is not the decentralized Crypto currency system that dominates the alternate digital currency system in the world. It is not likely to use Blockchain technology in the creation of CBDCs while the distributors may opt to use Block chain technology for their services.

If so, what is the advantage of introducing this new system is what we need to decypher.

At present RBI is likely to issue only CBDC-W which is a wholesale product to be used concurrently with the current account ledger they maintain now with the Banks. This is just a method to establish the system and notionally create a stock of CBDCs in India.

CBDC-R is not immediately being released and hence the public are unlikely to have access to the CBDC. If free Public access to CBDC-R  is to be enabled, it  needs a fool proof/ infallible  system where public can view the attributes of the token but not able to tamper with it. They should also be able to hold control/possession which they can transfer to another person.

This requires development of the “Wallet” system similar to what is used in the Crypto Wallet system but have to be managed by “Authorized CBDC Banks”.

In Bank operated wallets transactions move from one wallet to another both maintained by Banks and hence cannot guarantee anonymity of the transactions.

If the Government permits “Hardware Wallets”, then public can hold their stock of CBDCs in the physically held hardware devices which can be a USB device or a wireless enabled device in the form of a “Card”. The contents of the device should be viewable and the owner should be able to take out or place in tokens as if he is taking money out of his purse or putting it in. Ideally the view should be embedded in the device or it should be through the mobile device with its own security implications.

These devices need to be  secured so that there is no backdoor in the OEM that can steal money right from your hardware wallet. They should also be convenient to use. If they are stolen, there should be  some mechanism to restore the money from a back up.

While these devices are an exciting proposition for the business to create, once they become available,  they will also be instruments to keep black money and  continue the parallel economy without hindrance.

I hope RBI will remember that it is important to prevent raise of digital black money since it is more dangerous than the current black money system where criminals need to physically store large amount of black money.

Since ordinary users will not feel the need for the CBDC-R to replace the UPI system they are getting accustomed to, the need for CBDC-R to be introduced is at present very low and can be deferred as long as necessary.

On the other hand CBDC-W can be extended to Exporters and Importers on demand like the release of Foreign Exchange in the current system.

The real benefit of creating the CBDC as a monetary unit would be that India can join a consortium of countries with their own CBDCs and create a system of international settlement outside the purview of the US dollar dominated systems at present. This will protect India from any future sanctions that US may impose the way they tried to monetarily strangle Russia during the Ukraine conflict.

Liberation from the hegemony of the US financial system on the Indian foreign exchange transactions appear to be the real benefit of the creation of CBDT. As more and more countries join hands in this new system, there will be a new economic order in the world.

Presently 10 countries have reportedly fully launched CBDCs,  while a total of 105 countries are exploring the possibilities. 50 countries are said to be in advanced phase of exploration. China pilot is expected to expand in 2023. South Korea, Japan and Russia are in exploration stage like India. ( Refer CBDC Tracker here)

It is expected that the introduction of CBDC as a concept will accelerate in future and it appears that RBI has taken the right decision to segregate the CBDC-W and CBDC-R. This will enable introduction of CBDC in to the monetary system without opening up the flood gates of retail participation which may come initially only from black money hoarders and a few technology adventurists.

If CBDC-R has to be introduced, I would advocate the introduction of an interest bearing CBDC even if the interest is marginal like 1% or 2%. It will be a sovereign guaranteed investment that may attract investments from abroad. The SB rates of Banks are today higher and hence there is no danger of cannibalization of Bank deposits because of the interest. This will act as an incentivisation for people to convert their idle cash balance to CBDC.

RBI can also consider other innovations to make CBDC-R relevant. Otherwise it will only be a facilitation of Black money holding and is an un necessary instrument in the Indian society.

Let us observe the developments. This could be a serious disruption of the world economic order and India needs to take early charge of the developments.

(Comments are welcome)

Naavi