Data Security Council Partners With Facebook To Back New Privacy Applications

While the Indian government’s push for digitisation has been successful to a certain degree, security of data and users is one aspect where Indian small and medium businesses are woefully behind their Western counterparts. At a recent conference in Bengaluru, organised by the Data Security Council of India (DSCI), Gaurav Gupta, Principal Secretary of the IT department of the Karnataka government, reiterated this challenge.

Speaking at the Best Practices Meet 2019, on the theme of ‘Security at Scale’ Gupta told over 400 delegates from the Indian internet ecosystem, about the steps being taken by the government to ensure that the digitisation dream doesn’t succumb to the threat of cyber security.

Facebook also had a presence as it launched a Privacy Application Challenge along with DSCI, and presented five problem areas that privacy and security professionals, researchers, entrepreneurs, students, designers and startups would need to solve, said Rama Vedashree, CEO of DSCI.

The five problem areas are age-appropriate design, privacy safe-data sharing hub, privacy notice communication, anonymised data driven analytics and consent management. These are some of the deeper problems within the overall internet privacy issue. The initiative is taken to encourage the development of technological solutions and innovative products for data privacy.

Internet companies such as Akamai, Target, Blue Sapphire, iValue and SANS partnered at the conference, along with startups such as Spell Security, Attivo Networks, 3^rd Eye Techno Solutions, CloudSek and Qos exhibited their products and solutions at the two-day conference. The schedule also included workshops on ‘Malware Investigation using Memory Forensics’ to help attendees understand malicious programmes. 

While addressing the audience, Gupta laid stress on the importance of digitisation to become a $5 Tn economy. He added, “With digitisation come many possible security threats. Cybersecurity comes as part of the system design and today threats have emerged possibly due to gaps in infrastructure or the system, which needs to be addressed. It is therefore imperative to incorporate it in the system design stage itself.”

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