Folk Fest Registration Controversy Exemplifies the Need for Data Protection Law

Personal data collected when people registered for the Dhaka International Folk Fest was reportedly used and shared in ways that produced considerable public fury. The observation this piece makes is that the fury had nowhere to go.

As the law stood, the conduct complained of was technically lawful. That, and not the conduct, is the problem worth writing about: public outrage was being asked to do the work a statute should have been doing, and outrage is a poor regulator because it is selective, brief and unavailable to anyone without an audience.

Bangladesh’s ICT sector had by then produced platforms, applications and start-ups holding a substantial volume of personal data, with no framework governing consent, purpose limitation or onward transfer.

Read against my 2017 piece on data protection in Digital Bangladesh, the same argument appears twice, two years apart, with the gap unfilled in between. The controversy did not create the exposure. It made visible what the absence of law had already been permitting.