In this piece for The Financial Express, Prakhar Misra and Sharmadha Srinivasan argue that the current framework for community data in the Non-Personal Data report needs rethinking as the definition is too broad to be practically implementable.

Excerpts: 

"The definitions of community and community data are too broad. All anonymised personal data and data of “inanimate and animate things or phenomena” tied to a community is considered as community data. Thus, all datasets, from those owned by municipal corporations to raw, unprocessed data owned by telecom and e-commerce companies, could fall under this category.

The definition of a community is broad too—“any group of people that are bound by common interests and purposes involved in social/economic interactions”. An anonymised dataset of electricity bills of residents from a discom and another of users on a Facebook group—say, Manchester United fans—both qualify as community data. This is problematic on three levels—one conceptual, and two operational."

Read complete article here.