The SA Law Reform Commission has received more than 50 submissions to the Draft Protection of Personal Information Bill and expects more as it readies the legislation for next year.
More submissions during the next few weeks are expected, says Ananda Louw, SA Law Reform Commission researcher and one of the drafters of the legislation.
"Response to the proposed legislation has been extremely good since we released it for public comment last year. It seems most of the submissions agree on the general principles, although there are differences in the technicalities," she says.
The SA Law Reform Commission also conducted a series of workshops in February about the draft law.
Louw says the formulation of this law is particularly important from a business point of view due to problems with the transfer of data to countries outside the European Union, which has a privacy directive that stipulates how personal information can be handled.
Among the submissions, Louw says, are those from MTN, Vodacom, Cell C, the SA Police Service, various business associations and ICT organisations. The Internet Service Providers Association is still compiling its submission.
"The objective of the law is not to stop communications, but to regulate them in some way," Louw says.
One of the problems with privacy law is it affects almost every other piece of legislation, she says. "We have to look at the various sections of the Electronic Communications Transaction Act, the Promotion of Access to Information Act, the National Credit Act and others to see where there are overlaps, where they complement each other and where they may possibly contradict each other."
Speedy data gathering
"This is a particularly difficult piece of legislation to draft because a balance has to be found between an individual's right to privacy and the commercial necessity to gather or disseminate information," says Paul Esselaar, Internet Society of SA policy spokesman.
Esselaar says there are some key questions and misconceptions about gathering information from public sources and how they affect one's privacy.
"For instance, even if various bits of information on a person are gathered from public sources, a person's privacy can sill be violated if all of that information is put together," he says.
Esselaar says this concept is becoming more important in the information age due to the increased speed of data collection.
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