Laws regulating Data Protection in India
The Constitution of India guarantees everyone the fundamental right to life and dignity with the right to privacy as rightly encompassed in the landmark judgment, K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India (2018). This judgment had stirred the conversation around the need to protect data in India. Following this the government laid down the different versions of the Personal Data Protection Bills until 2023 when the Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act was enacted.
The newly enacted DPDP law is conceived to protect an individual’s autonomy over their personal data by demarcating rights for individuals and subsequent obligations for fiduciaries. The Act is enacted to ensure that the data of Indian residents is processed in a fair, transparent and secure manner.
What is personal data?
Any information that relates to or is identifiable as per any individual is referred to as personal data.
Section 2(t) of the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 defines ‘personal data’ meaning any data about an individual who is identifiable by or in relation to such data. Under the ambit of the newly enacted DPDP law lies a substantial paradigm shift in the manner in which organisations handle and process the data of Indian citizens.
Why data is important?
With India’s rapidly growing digital economy and the ever-changing economic, legal, and technological landscape data has become as precious as ‘gold’. India’s rapid shift towards digitization indicates the need for strong data privacy laws. The increased availability and reliance on technology has created massive opportunities for misuse of data.
Why was there a need to regularize data?
A development of a legislative framework for regularizing the data was crucial to address the challenges posed by the digital era, where data is a valuable asset and privacy is a fundamental right. It was the need of the hour especially in today’s interconnected world where vast amount of personal data/information are constantly being collected, processed and shared by various entities, whether it be businesses, government agencies and/or social media platforms. The enactment of such regulation is relevant to strike a balance between the legitimate needs of organisations to process the data and the fundamental rights of individuals to privacy and data security.
Artificial Intelligence and Data
We are living in the age of AI where everything down to our personal lives is transactional via smart phones and similar consumer technology products. Data fed Artificial intelligence (AI) has grown substantially to become incredibly advanced and is now capable of making automated decisions based on subtle patterns inferred from data footprints left on the internet. Amounts of personal data floating also raise the risk of theft, cyberbullying, to skew public opinion, creating fakes images, phishing attacks, and malware which are all examples of data breach leading to violation of an individual’s rights and other criminal activities based on data manipulation.
Given the fact that big tech companies have access to massive personal databases, it could potentially be used to expand, influence, monetize platforms, and exert greater sway over society. Although AI is part of our daily lives how it operates to leverage content is not clear and laws to regulate the same. Measures to increase transparency have become vital to prevent consumer mistrust which could hamper adoption of innovation, instead policies have been introduced to ensure adherence to ethical principles whilst dealing with personal data.
Our team at S.S. Rana is committed to help clients navigate this complex regulatory landscape by offering to aid and assist in adhering to the data protection law and rules and build a secure organizational structure for collection, processing and preservation of personal data.
For more information for Data Protection Law in India, please contact us at info@ssrana.com
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