The Bahrain Personal Data Protection (‘PDPL’ or ‘Law’) was enacted in 2018 to put a framework over capturing, managing and using data. This Law came into effect in Bahrain on August 1, 2019. Given the significance of this legislation, athGADLANG, a regional advisory, assurance, accounting and tax consulting firm hosted a webinar on the topic last month along with senior industry experts.
“Data has been at the centre of everybody's attention and the amount of data created today is approximately 2.5 quintillion bytes per day which is huge! But with this, comes the problem of data theft,” athGADLANG Global CEO and webinar moderator Arshad Gadit said. He went on to appreciate the efforts of Ministry of Justice, who have been assigned the role of implementation of the Law.
“You have to start at an early stage and understand the journey of your data, end to end, especially if you are collecting customer data. The data subject can now come back and say, ‘you need to anonymise my data’ or they can opt not to provide their data and still expect a product or service,” said Batelco’s Compliance Director Manal Al Sarraf, who was one of the three panellists.
Responding to a question, Al Salam Bank’s Head of Compliance and MLRO Ali Yousif Al Khaja proclaimed, “The Central Bank of Bahrain (CBB) expects compliance officers in Bahrain to be proactive rather than reactive. Furthermore, some of CBB’s existing rulebook modules like OM module focus on cyber security controls,” he said, emphasising that the devil is in the detail and compliance with this Law would require wholesale changes in the way that data is managed today by organisations.
“In any new implementation, the culture of an organisation is most critical and the most difficult part because you have to get people to do something that they have not done before. Despite the fact that there is a lot to do with systems in the case of PDPL, individuals are frontliners and they are supposed to understand the spirit of the PDPL,” Gulf Hotels Group Chief Financial Officer Charbel Sarkis said.
A participant poll was conducted during the event which saw representation from law makers and industry practitioners of various sectors. Results showed that 63 per cent of participants believe that “Compliance Function” is ultimately responsible for the implementation of PDPL in an organisation. 75 per cent of the participants answered that their team somewhat understand the Law, however, the most daunting fact was that only less than 50 per cent of the participants suggested that they had already started the process of implementation in their organisations.
During the Q&A session, participants posed a variety of interesting questions which the panellists did their best to address. The webinar concluded on a positive note, emphasising that in order to make the organisations compliant with the Law, the process should have already begun. Mr. Gadit proposed to conduct similar webinars in the future for the benefit of the industry at large and also put himself forward to support the government authorities in implementing the Law. The ATH Consultancy WLL office is based in Al-Seef, Bahrain and is part of a regional firm, athGADLANG.
For more information, Mr. Gadit can be reached at 33777786 or arshad@athgadlang.com.
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