SCENARIO – Please use the following to answer the next question:
Bharat Medicals is an established retail chain selling medical goods, with a presence in a number of cities throughout India. Their strategic partnership with major hospitals in these cities helped them capture an impressive market share over the years. However, with lifestyle and demographic shifts in India, the company saw a huge opportunity in door-to-door delivery of essential medical products. The need for such a service was confirmed by an independent consumer survey the firm conducted recently.
The company has launched their e-commerce platform in three metro cities, and plans to expand to the rest of the country in the future. Consumers need to register on the company website before they can make purchases. They are required to enter details such as name, age, address, telephone number, sex, date of birth and nationality – information that is stored on the company's servers. (Consumers also have the option of keeping their credit card number on file, so that it does not have to be entered every time they make payment.) If ordered items require a prescription, that authorization needs to be uploaded as well. The privacy notice explicitly requires that the consumer confirm that he or she is either the patient or has consent of the patient for uploading the health information. After creating a unique user ID and password, the consumer's registration will be confirmed through a text message sent to their listed mobile number.
To remain focused on their core business, Bharat outsourced the packaging, product dispatch and delivery activities to a third party firm, Maurya Logistics Ltd., with which it has a contractual agreement. It shares with Maurya Logistics the consumer name, address and other product-related details at the time of every purchase.
If consumers underwent medical treatment at one of the partner hospitals and consented to having their data transferred, their order requirement will be sent to their Bharat Medicals account directly, thereby doing away with the need to manually place an order for the medications.
Bharat Medicals takes regulatory compliance seriously; to ensure data privacy, it displays a privacy notice at the time of registration, and includes all the information that it collects. At this stage of their business, the company plans to store consumer information indefinitely, since the percentage of repeat customers and the frequency of orders per customer is still uncertain.
Which type of information collected by Bharat Medicals is considered sensitive personal information under the Information Technology Rules?
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