Naavi thanks the CyberFrat Community for the recognition as an influencer in the Cyber Security domain. I take this opportunity to look back on how from being a Banker and later as a Financial Marketing domain expert in an Advertising agency how my career transformed through Cyber Security, Information Security and Data Privacy.
My journey into Cyber world started around 1995 after Windows95 made internet access more comfortable. The initial professional activity using the computer was as an Internet journalist and also as a News Paper columnist using the Internet resources to run a weekly investment advisory column in Indian Express. The Cyber Security concerns at that time were low and we were talking of border less Cyber Society.
In 1998, I switched over to Cyber Laws when the draft E Commerce Act 1998 was published. Those were the days of Dewang Mehta at NASSCOM and the focus of Computerisation was societal benefit and not commercial exploitation. In 1999 when I wrote the first book “Cyber Laws for Every Netizen in India”, the dream was that there is a community of “Netizens” who are the citizens of the Global Internet society and we are all “Cinezens” who are citizens of a physical country and also Netizens of the Internet society.
Many of my thoughts at that time was to maintain the dual nature of the society where physical society activities would be enriched by Internet as a tool. Even the thoughts on E-Banking as an exclusive Internet Branch, the Smart Cards (Zemo Cards) etc were made in this Utopian thought that Internet society would co-exist with the physical society. These thoughts have undergone a change over the last few decades and today the Netizens lord over Citizens and hence the role of “Security of Citizens from Netizens” has become imperative.
With the advent of E Commerce, the greed of money took over and along with it, the concept of Global Internet society was killed. We created “Internet Boundaries” and made physical laws applicable within virtual jurisdictions. With money flowing in the Internet transactions, Criminals took to Internet as their domain of operation.
This lead to the growth of Cyber Security as a domain. This evolved into regulatory regimes and the concept of “Legal Aspects of Information Security” was born and was adopted as my focus.
With Cyber Law College in 2000, I entered the world of Privacy creating a “Chapter” in the curriculum of the course on Cyber Law which expanded around 2005 into HIPAA Consultancy. I also did lot of work on developing Cyber Jurisprudence in India with ITA 2000 as the base and assisted Cyber Crime investigators in a number of cases.
Since 2018 the GDPR took over all the attention and I simultaneously started looking at the Indian Data Protection Law. While In 1998 I was one of the earliest entrants to the discussion on ITA 2000 and in 2018, I was once again one of the earliest in starting a discussion on PDDPB 2018. The difference was that the group of interested persons in Data Protection increased in geometric proportions where as in 1998-2005 the group if interested persons in ITA 2000 could be counted on the fingers. One of the two other persons who were involved in Cyber Law was Pavan Duggal and the other was Mr Rohas Nagpal who have to be remembered at this point of time.
Today Naavi represents Data Protection which is inclusive of protection of data which was the earlier focus. I have also started switching over to Data Governance and looking at Neuro Rights and AI law as the next domains to focus.
At this time, CyberFrat to have recognized me as part of the CF 100 community which also consists of professionals like Pavan Duggal, Triveni Singh, and Prashant Mali, Rakshit Tandon, Samir Datt (and more) is an honour to cherish.
I therefore thank CyberFrat for the recognition.
Naavi
