by Mallu Cyber Soldiers

Nitin Pandey: Data is the new gold. Having access to data gives one the ability to access and control someone’s ID, Bank accounts and all sorts of other information. Also in India

Data is the new gold. Having access to data gives one the ability to access and control someone’s ID, Bank accounts and all sorts of other information, says cybersecurity Expert and Chairman of National Information Security Council Nitin Pandey. “Data Privacy has become a big challenge in our country. Almost every Application is tracking and monitoring our activities”, he added. On June 29, Government of India banned 59 Chinese apps including TikTok which was a good move to protect our privacy. On September 2, Government of India again banned 118 Chinese apps including PubG which shook China and Tencent, a chinese based company and stakeholder of PubG owner company Krafton loses $14 Billion in Market Value after India bans PubG Game. India was PubG’s biggest market with 25% of total installs.

The best strategy to counter foreign cyber espionage against India is to develop the contents “in house”

Beijing always spy on Indian users with the help of these apps and they were also earning huge amount of money from Indian users of their apps. By banning these apps, we stopped the outflow of funds to overseas and that is mainly China. It also gives an opportunity to Indian IT companies to venture into Gaming world which has been almost non-existent so far. So, for Pandey, a good strategy would be to develop our own content and provide a platform to Indian Gamers. On safety concern, these apps were addictive and Psychologically these games and apps were making teenagers so much aggressive and violent. We already know so many cases in which PubG addictive users killed their family members when asked not to play it too much. Many people died while making TikTok videos. It was really a very serious concern and so many petitions were filed against such apps.

Privacy and safety are at risk. People depend on U.S. based giants and almost each and every App takes unnecessary permission from to track and monitor user’s activities

The question, according the cybersecurity expert, is: is it enough to secure our Privacy and safety? The point is when it comes to communication mediums, then we are mostly dependent on U.S based Giant companies like Facebook, Google, Twitter which also sell our data to third parties. It is already in public domain that Facebook details of Indian Users are available for sale on Dark Web. Questions on UIDAI (Unique Identification Authority of India/Aadhar) data breach, in fact, has been raised many times as well. Almost each and every App takes unnecessary permission from us to track and monitor our activities. Taking permissions of required features are fine but Apps like Hotstar take “Body Sensor” permissions from users which make these apps suspicious. Hotstar is an entertainment App, not a fitness App. We don’t know on the name of “Contact” permission what access these Apps are actually taking from us.

It’s imperative in India to pass as soon as possible the Personal Data Protection Bill 2019

This is the main reason I always urge the Government of India to pass the Personal Data Protection Bill 2019 where a committee had formed by Ministry of IT & E in 2017 which was chaired by Retd Supreme Court Judge Justice B.N. Srikrishna and committee submitted the draft personal data protection bill in July 2018 and is still pending, Nitin Pandey concluded. It is very important to pass the bill of Personal Data Protection to keep our data safe and secured says Nitin Pandey.