Before our databases connect, the state must earn citizens’ trust first

Every society runs on an agreement no citizen ever signs but almost everyone honours. We pay taxes. We register births. We tell the hospital our illnesses and the tax office our income. We do so because a state cannot serve people it doesn’t know. In return, we ask for little: use our information for the right purpose, stay within your limits, and answer to us when your power interferes with our lives. This is called the social contract.

For decades, this agreement has lived on paper. The tax office knows my income. The passport office knows my face. The hospital knows my illnesses. No office has ever seen the whole me. This fragmentation has made life quite inconvenient: every Bangladeshi has stood in a queue with copies of documents, proving to one office what another already knows. But it has also kept the state's power constrained within limits. Our inconvenience and our protection exist in the same filing cabinet.

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Now Bangladesh is preparing for interoperability. Government systems will exchange information, and the citizen will no longer have to be the messenger between offices. Having the experience of building digital government systems for more than two decades, I welcome this with an open heart, but I must also say plainly what the diagrams don’t. When the pieces join, the state changes. Its memory grows longer, its sight grows wider, and its reach grows quieter. The old agreement was written for a state of paper. Before a state of connected data begins to operate, that agreement must be rewritten, and the citizen must be present at the rewriting.

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The Personal Data Protection Act, 2026 has begun that rewriting. For the first time, the law says my data belongs to me and the state holds it in trust. But ownership is the first sentence of the new agreement, not the last. If the data is truly mine, then before it starts travelling between institutions, I am entitled, humbly but firmly, to ask the state five questions.

First: who is the authority? Before any office shows my information to another, the government must state clearly, through law, who may permit that. Is it parliament, which speaks for the people? A specific law naming a specific purpose? Or will it be, in practice, an office order, or a technical platform whose settings quietly decide what happens? This must be settled before anything else, because in a connected system, the ability to share appears everywhere, and ability is not permission. If the authority is not named before the connections are made, then everyone with access becomes the authority, and therefore no one is.

Second: where is my consent? I accept that some duties of the state cannot wait for my agreement. Tax collection and criminal investigation stand on law, not on my permission—and rightly so. But the law must say so narrowly and openly. For everything else, ask me, in simple language, at the moment of sharing, for a specific purpose: this record, to this office, for this service. Let me say no. Let me change my mind later. Consent buried inside a form no one reads is not consent; it’s a signature taken, not a permission given.

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Third: will I know who is using my data? Every digital access leaves a footprint; technology records everything unless it’s told not to. So let me see the footprint. Show me who looked at my record, when, for what reason, and under whose authority. In Estonia, a citizen reads this history the way one reads a bank statement, and officials think twice before opening a file, because the owner may be watching. That single window would do more for public trust than a hundred assurances. I should not be asked to trust what I am never allowed to see.

Fourth: what is my remedy? If my information is leaked, misused, or shared beyond its lawful purpose, whom do I hold responsible, and what will I receive? The office that kept my data, the office that asked for it, or the platform between them? If everyone is responsible, then no one is. Before the systems connect, the government should say plainly: this institution will investigate, this authority will punish, and this is how the harmed citizen will be made whole. A right without a remedy is only a sentence in a statute. The citizen must know, in advance, the door on which to knock.

Fifth: how will my data actually be preserved? Where will it live, and how strongly will it be locked? Will it be gathered into one giant national pool, a single prize for every hacker on earth? Or will it remain where it was collected, with offices exchanging verified answers instead of whole files, as Estonia wisely chose? Will every connected office meet one minimum standard of security, and who will have the courage to disconnect the office that fails? A connected system is only as safe as its most careless office. And the safest data of all is the data that never needs to travel: most services need a yes or a no, not my whole record.

I ask these five questions with respect, not suspicion. A democracy is judged not only by the power it holds but by the limits it accepts. And citizens don’t fear a capable state; they fear power without boundaries. The success of interoperability will never be counted in connected databases. It will be counted in the quiet confidence of a citizen who knows who may see their information, who gave the permission, who is watching the watchers, and where to go when something goes wrong. Democracies are remembered less for the power they gather than for the limits they place upon themselves. Perhaps that is the unfinished social contract Bangladesh must complete before its databases begin talking to one another: not the connection of systems, but the completion of trust.

Aminul Bari Shuvro is chief solutions officer at Synesis IT PLC and a digital transformation and e-governance expert.

Views expressed in this article are the author's own.

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