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KOLKATA: The Indian government will shortly impose hefty penalties on business process outsourcing (BPO) firms that compromise on the data privacy of individual customers. It is likely to tighten the provisions linked to data privacy and data protection in the Information Technology (IT) Act, 2000, and is working closely with the US to emulate existing global best practices in the realm of data security and privacy, a senior official in the communications ministry told ET. There is a view in sections of the government that the present IT Act, 2000, does not adequately address data privacy concerns of individuals . And hence the need for more stringent legislation by way of penal provisions to effectively deal with companies passing on sensitive personal in-formation of individuals to third-parties without prior consent.

The law ministry is working on a proposal to make right to privacy a fundamental right in the Indian Constitution. The right to privacy would include the right to confidentiality of communication, confidentiality of private or family life, protection of his honour and good name, protection from search, detention or exposure of lawful communication between individuals, privacy from surveillance, confidentiality of banking, financial, medical and legal information, protection from identity theft of various kinds, protection of use of a person's photographs, fingerprints, DNA samples and other samples taken at police stations and other places and protection of data relating to individual.

" Internet giant Google said sorry to New Zealanders for collecting personal data from wireless networks for its "Street View" mapping service, in the latest in a series of apologies. The company said it did not realise until earlier this year that cars it was using to photograph public streets were also gathering information known as "payload data" sent over unsecured Wi-Fi systems. Unencrypted information sent on Wi-Fi systems that are not password-protected potentially contains personal information, including the content of emails. "

Social-networking sites such as Facebook, or search engines such as Google, may face court action if they fail to obey planned EU data privacy rules, European Union justice chief Viviane Reding has said. Reding will propose an overhaul of the EU's 16-year-old laws on data protection in the coming months to enforce more safeguards on how personal information is used.