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Govt May Amend IT Act To Address Growing Data Security Concerns: Report

According to the Centre for Internet and Society, data containing 135 million Aadhaar numbers and 100 million bank account details may have leaked from govt web sites.
Mansi Thapliyal / Reuters

The govt is drafting changes to the current IT security laws to bring about stronger provisions to address the growing data protection and security concerns, Aruna Sundararajan, Secretary, Union Electronics and Information Technology Ministry, told The Hindu.

Sundarajan said the union government has also begun educating government agencies on the sensitivity of Aadhaar related data, and said the focus is also in enforcing existing laws.

Security and privacy of Aadhaar data is a growing concern as a number of security incidents have been reported recently. Earlier this week, the Centre for Internet and Society said that data regarding containing 135 million Aadhaar numbers and 100 million bank account details may have leaked from official portals that deal with government pension and rural employment schemes.

"Actually, Aadhaar has very strong privacy regulation built into it... But the area we are working on is enforcement," Sundararajan said. "People are not aware that so a large number of government agencies are making available all this sensitive data. So now, the process is to educate them so that they become aware that Aadhaar data is not meant to be published like this freely.

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This article exists as part of the online archive for HuffPost India, which closed in 2020. Some features are no longer enabled. If you have questions or concerns about this article, please contact indiasupport@huffpost.com.