Government Sights are Ban from Publishing Business Information

According to two officials familiar with the development, the Finance Bill proposes to criminalise the illicit publication of transaction-level information provided by business entities to the customs department because such data could be misused by competing international entities and hostile countries to the detriment of Indian businesses.

They argue that there should be legislative measures prohibiting the dissemination of data that could be exploited by other countries to India’s detriment.

The Finance Bill, which was introduced in Parliament on February 1, proposed to add “Section 135AA” to the Customs Act, which would protect import and export data submitted to customs by importers and exporters in their declarations by making it illegal to publish such data unless it was required by law.

The proposed data privacy and confidentiality regulations drew a lot of attention from everyone. On one hand, Congress MP Shashi Tharoor claimed that the government was restricting public access to data, while on the other, FIEO director general Ajay Sahai told the media that “exporters had pitched for stringent measures to prevent commercially sensitive information from being shared as they were being procured from the Customs ICEGATE and being sold for a premium,” according to an official.

The Indian Customs Electronic Gateway (ICEGATE) is a national portal run by the Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs (CBIC) that allows cargo carriers and other business partners to electronically file customs documents.

“Hon’ble MP’s attention is invited to the clause suggested under sub-section 135 AA (2) under which Government agencies, such as the Department of Commerce, will continue to disseminate data as per present practise,” the CBIC wrote in response to Tharoor’s tweet on the subject.

“The proposed clause will only criminalise the illicit publication of personalised, transaction level information by private entities, which harms Indian businesses’ competitive position in international trade and compromises their data privacy,” it said in a second tweet on the subject on February 5 from its official handle @cbic india.

In any event, the official stated that data publication through the Department of Commerce will continue unabated. Currently, the Director General of Commercial Intelligence & Statistics (DGCI&S) publishes export and import data on the government’s tradestat.commerce.gov.in website.

“Before being published on the internet, the data is aggregated and properly anonymized.” Data can be extracted at an 8-digit level, country-by-country, with quantities and values of items imported and exported. This aggregate data is helpful to organisations and scholars, but it appears to be insufficient for business. To avoid Customs valuation issues, they are looking for competitive intelligence and mining information on buyers, sellers, and even ‘contemporaneous values’ of commodities. “A tremendously lucrative data mining and trading sector has resulted from this need,” he said.

According to reports, the darkweb has 130 million records for sale, and the Directorate General of Systems filed a FIR with Delhi police under the IT Act 2000 in December 2021, after missives to other ministries on increasing data security of economically critical customs data, he added.