Privacy policies of e‐governance initiatives: Evidence from India

• Published date: 01 November 2020
• Author: Sourya Joyee De,Rashmi Shukla
• Date: 01 November 2020
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/pa.2160

PRACTITIONER PAPER

Privacy policies of e-governance initiatives: Evidence from

India

Sourya Joyee De

1

|Rashmi Shukla

2

1

Area of IT & Systems, Indian Institute of

Management Raipur, Raipur, India

2

Area of Economic Environment and General

Management, Indian Institute of Management

Raipur, Raipur, India

Correspondence

Rashmi Shukla, Area of Economic Environment

and General Management, Indian Institute of

Management Raipur, Raipur, India.

Email: rashmishukla@iimraipur.ac.in

Government of India has introduced several digital services under the Digital India

campaign, for achieving higher-order excellence in e-governance. While these ser-

vices help in digital empowerment of the citizens, they also process huge amounts of

personal data. In a developing country, where citizens' awareness about privacy prob-

lems is poor and no comprehensive data protection framework are in place, this is an

alarming concern as unfair personal data processing without sufficient data protec-

tion 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 prac-

tices 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 gov-

ernment 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 suit-

able designs of privacy policies and modes of generating privacy awareness for the

large and extremely diverse beneficiaries in India.

1|INTRODUCTION

In developing countries today, governments have been playing a

major role in the digital inclusion of the masses through various digital

initiatives. In India itself, under the “Digital India”campaign

1

of the

Government of India, several e-governance and digitized citizen

services such as BHIM (Bharat Interface for Money),

2

an application

enabling financial inclusion and cashless payments and UMANG

(Unified Mobile Application for New-AgeGovernance),

3

a platform

enabling access to various government services to citizens, have been

rolled out. These government e-services process a large volume of

personal data such as identification information, contact details,

Received: 13 August 2019Revised: 14 April 2020Accepted: 21 April 2020

DOI: 10.1002/pa.2160

J Public Affairs. 2020;20:e2160.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/pa© 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd1of11

https://doi.org/10.1002/pa.2160