Donors to nonprofit Alt News had their information given to law enforcement without consent, highlighting limited data protections in the world’s largest democracy.
Indian police obtained the data from Razorpay under section 91 of the Criminal Procedure Code, which allows officials to seek documents or data connected to an ongoing investigation. But criminal lawyers told WIRED that the law gives police considerable flexibility, leaving room for overreach or misuse.
“Section 91 allows the police to make any request for information to any person during an inquiry, and it’s a standard investigative tool,” said Abhinav Sekhri, a criminal lawyer based in New Delhi. “Companies routinely receive such requests, at severe cost, because there are consequences for noncompliance, leaving them with no choice at times.” One such consequence could be an executive facing criminal action and potentially imprisonment, Sekhri says.
Meanwhile, financial technology experts say that even if Razorpay hadn’t complied with the demand to hand over Alt News data, the police could likely have retrieved it from other players in the payments ecosystem. “The source and destination information is stored across the entire chain,” said Srikanth Lakshmanan, a researcher who runs Cashless Consumer, a collective that works on consumer awareness of digital payments in India.
This broad collection and sharing of data can make privacy in digital payments in India seem nigh on impossible. “The state of privacy in digital payments in India is nonexistent,” Lakshmanan says. The ease with which digital data can be shared and leaked makes privacy challenging around the world, but India’s centralized biometric identity system, Aadhaar, can add extra vulnerabilities, he says.
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