Digital privacy concerns in India for medical tourism

• Published date: 01 December 2022
• Author: Diya Guha Roy
• Date: 01 December 2022
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/pa.2762

RESEARCH ARTICLE

Digital privacy concerns in India for medical tourism

Diya Guha Roy

Division of Marketing, Goa Institute of

Management, Sanquelim, India

Correspondence

Diya Guha Roy, Division of Marketing, Goa

Institute of Management, Sanquelim, India.

Email: diya.roy@gmail.com;diya.roy@gim.ac.in

Investments in Indian Medical Tourism (MT) have been growing at a greater rate than

the global standards. However, unfortunately, Indian legislations have not managed

to keep pace with this phenomenal growth, and have thereby been lacking in forming

specific amendments, coupled with both preventive and compensative decrees.

Moreover, safety and security have emerged as an aggregated inter-web of complex

multi-dimensional components, encompassing aspects such as “public and personal data

safety,”“legal protection of tourists,”“consumers”“protection,”and so on. The internet

has affected “data integration,”“storage,”“exchange”exposing thereby the possibilities

of security breaches. All of these, in amalgamation, call for elevating the overall hygiene

of India's growing medical tourism industry. Based upon this backdrop, this study looks

into the theories of security, privacy, and consumerism, and the need for preventive

cybercrime laws in India's medical tourism sector, especially considering several technical

vulnerabilities that do exist. In this endeavor, I reviewed and analyzed journals and gov-

ernment policies, and have looked to identify some of the fallacies and gaps. Additionally,

I also attempted to identify some of the needs that exist in MT's cybersecurity space,

both within the Indian and international contexts.

KEYWORDS

cybersecurity, digital privacy, India, medical tourism

1|INTRODUCTION

In an era, when the internet has been ruling the roost, concerns

relating to data privacy have escalated significantly, especially with

emerging technologies like cloud computing (both private and public),

IoT, and Big data. These new tools help in storing, analyzing and using

private data, due to which “online security”has become a reality today,

be it for internal employees of an organization, governments, as well as

private data hackers. Security breaches are being observed from multiple

sources and multifarious forms, such as software attacks (e.g., malware,

virus, adware, spyware, rootkits, zombies, ransomware, among others);

theft of intellectual property (IP); identity theft; theft of equipment and

information; sabotage; information extortion; social media attacks,

among others. Therefore, it is a practical priority to introduce adequate

security legislations for the medical tourism vertical.

Specifically, in the light of government and corporate data leaks

(see Table 1, more data can be found at https://www.upguard.com/

blog/biggest-data-breaches#) vis-a-vis their impacts on rousing public

aggression, confusion, jeopardizing economies, and political volatilities

and vulnerabilities alike, it has become imperative to keep a strict

check on data privacy, both from individual users as well as an organi-

zational point of view.

Dolnicar and Jordaan (2007) for instance, have thoroughly ana-

lyzed the perceptual differences about both privacy and trust under

different cultural contexts. The authors mentioned that consumer pri-

vacy is a global issue and “increasing global interdependence means

possible negative consequences for those businesses and/ or coun-

tries that rely on the unimpeded flow of personal information and that

cannot claim to protect the data of consumers in ways that match the

standard of the trading partner.”(p. 146). Furthermore, due to the

globalized world, a safe market-oriented approach is needed for intel-

ligent direct marketing.

Therefore, before deciding on “what to do”with these data

breaches, it is important to understand “what it is”in the context of

data privacy. Referring to Pangrazio and Selwyn's (2019) study, it may

be noted that they emphasized domain knowledge and data literacy

Received: 6 March 2021 Revised: 14 August 2021 Accepted: 16 September 2021

DOI: 10.1002/pa.2762

J Public Affairs. 2022;22(Suppl. 1):e2762. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/pa © 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. 1of11

https://doi.org/10.1002/pa.2762