Simon Hu, President of Alibaba Cloud recently spoke about data privacy and its effects on data sharing across the world. He said that the core principle of their company was “respecting data security and privacy”. Speaking at the Alibaba Cloud Computing conference in Hangzhou, Hu told a leading financial daily, “Our views are different from other companies. We have set up a data centre. We are also building a data team that will help provide big data and AI services to Indian companies.”

Alibaba has investments in several Indian companies including Paytm, Zomato and BigBasket.

Earlier this month, Google CEO Sundar Pichai had reportedly written a letter talking about his concerns on cross-border global data transfer. Pichai had written a letter to Ravi Shankar Prasad, Union Minister for Electronics and Information Technology on 5 September, entreating him for a free flow of data across borders. He also reportedly said that such a step will encourage global companies to contribute to India’s digital economy as well as benefit Indian startups that are looking at expanding globally.