Arif Reshad
University of Essex, UK
Meem Arafat Manab’s article, published in The Daily Star on 7 July 2026, offers a compelling critique of Bangladesh’s Personal Data Protection Act (2026), arguing that the law is structurally inadequate to safeguard citizens’ personal data. While the piece makes a persuasive case regarding enforcement gaps and architectural flaws in Bangladesh’s digital infrastructure, it occasionally overreaches in its theoretical proposals and underdevelopes the practical constraints that shaped the legislation. In this review article, we engage with the core article, but we investigate whether the new act is actually going to perform to its potential, and the reasons why it may not.
Strengths: Structural Diagnosis and Empirical Grounding
Manab’s article’s greatest strength lies in its refusal to treat data breaches as isolated technical failures. By tracing a clear line through three incidents, namely, the Shwapno data breach, Dismislab’s investigation into voter lists sold on Facebook, and the repeated exposure of National Identity (NID) data via Telegram bots and API leaks, Manab makes a convincing case that these are not isolated failures but symptoms of a systemic problem. The article’s concept of “shadow copies” is especially sharp: data pulled for legitimate verification purposes but then retained indefinitely, with no audit trail or deletion schedule.
This reframes matters; because it shifts attention away from the core Election Commission database and toward the real point of failure, i.e. the 174 connected organizations that serve as its weakest links. Rather than repeating the familiar call for “stronger laws,” this architectural framing pushes the conversation toward a more fundamental question: how does data flow through the system, and where does it leak?
The critique of the Act’s enforcement structure is just as pointed. Section 49, which requires the regulatory Authority to comply with government directives on grounds of national security or public order, emerges as the fatal flaw in the entire framework. A regulator barred from investigating the state, Manab argues, is no regulator at all, and merely “a complaints desk.” This point lands with real force when set against two comparisons: the GDPR’s Article 52, which guarantees data protection authorities statutory independence and has enabled them to fine their own governments, and Kenya’s data protection regulator, established in 2019 as a genuinely independent body. Placed side by side, these examples turn an abstract accountability gap into something concrete and unmistakable.
Weaknesses: Undertheorized Alternatives and Omitted Counterarguments
However, the article’s proposed alternatives are less rigorously developed than its critique. The data commons model (including minimal disclosure through cryptographic verification and data cooperatives) is introduced compellingly but remains largely aspirational. Manab acknowledges that the NID spine is already built and that “those choices, once made, are very difficult to reverse,” yet offers no transition pathway from the current accumulation model to the commons model. For a country where 174 organizations are already connected to the NID database and shadow copies proliferate, the feasibility of retrofitting cryptographic verification or establishing functional data cooperatives deserved far more concrete elaboration than the article provides.
The invocation of Aaron Swartz and Tim Berners-Lee’s Solid project, while intellectually resonant, feels tangential to the immediate regulatory question at hand. These references gesture toward philosophical commitments about information as a public good but do not address the gritty implementation challenges facing Bangladesh’s digital public infrastructure. The article acknowledges this gap when it notes that governance “built into how a system works is more durable than governance imposed from outside,” yet never reconciles this insight with the reality that the architecture is already built and that structural redesign is costly, politically fraught, and technically complex.
Additionally, the article underweights the political economy behind the Act. Placing the regulator under the Prime Minister’s Office reflects deliberate choices about executive control over data governance, not accident. Examining why this design was chosen, and what tradeoffs true independence would entail, would strengthen the critique by engaging real reform constraints rather than measuring Bangladesh against an idealized European standard. Likewise, the missing breach notification requirement is framed as an unambiguous failure, but the article doesn’t explore whether lobbying, capacity limits, or legislative compromise shaped that gap.
The economic argument for EU data adequacy is well taken, particularly the observation that without adequacy, compliance burdens fall on businesses least equipped to carry them. But it sits awkwardly alongside the commons framework, which is framed in terms of collective governance rather than trade alignment. The article does not resolve whether the primary motivation for stronger data protection should be economic integration or citizen empowerment, and the two rationales sometimes pull in different directions.
Conclusion
Manab’s article is an essential contribution to Bangladesh’s data governance discourse: its structural diagnosis of breach causation, its critique of regulatory dependence, and its insistence that law alone cannot fix architectural flaws are all convincingly argued. Where it falls short is in bridging the gap between critique and prescription; the data commons vision remains underspecified, the political constraints on independence are unexamined, and the transition path from the current compromised architecture to the proposed alternative is left largely uncharted. A stronger article would have spent less time on European comparison and more on the messy, specific politics of how Bangladesh might get from here to there.
