Protecting Data in Digital Bangladesh

Four of the five most valuable companies in the world run on collecting, storing and using personal data. By 2017 the same commodification had reached Bangladesh through mobile subscriptions, e-TIN registration, the digitisation of state functions and a proliferation of platforms and applications.

What had not reached Bangladesh was a law governing any of it. Collection was expanding, the value of what was collected was rising, and the citizen had no enforceable right over either.

The framing this piece presses is that data protection belongs with infrastructure rather than with civil-liberties afterthoughts. A state that digitises its own functions becomes one of the largest processors of its citizens’ data, which makes the absence of a framework a governance failure before it is a privacy failure. Digital Bangladesh had built the pipes and skipped the plumbing code.

The argument was made in 2017. Bangladesh was still debating a data protection statute years later, which is the substance of the follow-up I wrote in 2019.