Privacy policies of e‐governance initiatives
Evidence from India
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12706263 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Sourya Joyee De (0000-0002-1138-0315, Area of IT & Systems Indian Institute of Management Raipur Raipur India, corresponding author), Rashmi Shukla (0000-0003-4237-8864, Area of Economic Environment and General Management Indian Institute of Management Raipur Raipur India, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2020 |
| Publication date | 2020-05-26 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Public Affairs (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1472-3891 • E-ISSN: 1479-1854 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1002/pa.2160 |
| OpenAlex | W3032730206 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 4 |
| References cited | 16 |
Government of India has introduced several digital services under the Digital India campaign, for achieving higher-order excellence in e-governance. While these services help in digital empowerment of the citizens, they also process huge amounts of personal data. In a developing country, where citizens' awareness about privacy problems is poor and no comprehensive data protection framework are in place, this is an alarming concern as unfair personal data processing without sufficient data protection measures can inflict severe privacy harms such as identity theft, discrimination, and surveillance. A privacy policy is a standard method for informing users about data handling practices of digital service providers and is meant to increase transparency and hence, user's trust on service providers. With this background, in this paper, (1) we identify, based on international and national legal standards, a list of best practices that a comprehensive privacy policy must follow in order to be accessible and informative to the users of digital services in India; (2) with respect to these best practices, we evaluate the privacy policies of two prominent digital services in India, (a) for financial inclusion, Bharat Interface for Money (BHIM) and (b) for aggregation of e-governance services, Unified Mobile Application for New-Age Governance, and observe that most of the best practices are not met by these; (3) we interviewed BHIM users using a semistructured interview guide, primary observations from which concur with our observations from (2) that there remain scopes of improvement in BHIM's privacy policy; (4) we conclude that (a) missing information in privacy policies can signify deeper problems in the data protection mechanisms of digital services and these need to be identified, (b) users tend to trust applications provided by government based on the assumption that it will not misuse their personal data. This trust can be further enhanced by suitable actions from the government in improving the privacy policies of its e-services, (c) extensive studies are needed to find out suitable designs of privacy policies and modes of generating privacy awareness for the large and extremely diverse beneficiaries in India
Business · Computer security · Corporate governance · Data governance · Data Protection Act 1998 · Data quality · Empowerment · Government (linguistics · Information privacy · Internet privacy · Order (exchange · Political science · Privacy policy · Public relations · Service (business · Service provider · Transparency (behavior · Computer Science · E-Government and Public Services · Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting · Law · Privacy, Security, and Data Protection · Finance · Marketing
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| Citations per year | 0.8 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2021 - 2025 (5) |
| Highly cited | No |