Vishal Raghavan has an opinion piece in The Leaflet about the failure of Indian firms to notify customers of breaches or to be held accountable and fined monetarily by regulators. He begins by reviewing a number of high-profile breaches reported in the last year or so, and the notes that all of the companies didn’t notify their customers of the breaches — “it was either cybersecurity firms or independent security researchers or the media who made them public.” He explains:
The I-T Act, 2000 lacks a provision making reporting of data breach by a company mandatory. Hacked companies take advantage of this flaw and never report such breaches to avoid judicial proceedings.
Section 43A only prescribes a penalty or compensation to be paid by a company for its failure to protect customer data. The compensation amount or penalty will be decided by an adjudicating officer appointed under Section 46.
To date, he states, “no court has punished a company for data breach or ordered payment of damages to a customer(s) affected by such breach.”
Read more of his analysis and commentary on The Leaflet.