Data protection is considered an esoteric subject, but affects the entirety of the modern economy, ranging from a home-based cake supplier who maintains a list of customers, their preferences and contacts, to a multinational insurance company. Sri Lanka being the first South Asian country to enact data protection legislation and the pervasive effects of data protection, the bill deserved more discussion. It is unfortunate that the scrutiny it received was limited, for the most part, to its co-existence with the Right to Information Act, No. 12 of 2016, another broad-impact law that applies to …