Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023
Context:
- Numerous facets of human existence can benefit from the extensive applications of digital data.
- Digital technologies that are predictive are dependable because of the ongoing discourse surrounding data.
- The intermediaries and stakeholders who support the system predispose us to hear two pre-programmed replies when a digital deployment fails, or at least does not function as intended: We need more data to create better outputs, and we need better data to get more dependable results.
Three fundamental ideas for better data naturalisation and more data:
- Firstly, the data is merely a description of what is happening and is therefore impartial.
- Secondly, the information is immediately transactional and has no bearing on the individuals or events it depicts.
- Third, data can be exchanged for services, advantages, and conveniences since it is a commodity.
- These three guidelines present digital data as digital things that are born digitally and have a shaky relationship to the experiences and lives of the subjects they are intended to convey.
The relevance of India’s Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act 2023:
- The Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act 2023, which India has enacted, is a historic development that is in line with other national and international data protection regulations worldwide.
- It outlines how both public and private institutions are to use digital data and to what extent. Enacted in 2018, the Data Protection Act bears a striking resemblance to the General Data Protection Regulation that was implemented by the European Union in 2016.
- The ability to extract, exploit, and exchange data to create targeted profiles, segregated filter bubbles, and contained echo chambers that have detrimental effects on the social, personal, political, and economic well-being of the people being targeted by data industries is made possible by the regulatory instruments mentioned above.
- The Data Protection and Privacy Act of 2023 emphasises that data is not just a valuable resource but also that, in the absence of safeguards, it can do enormous harm to the individuals associated with a data set.
- Our algorithmic networks have a frighteningly wide range of correlational, causal, and crucial connection-making abilities that allow them to target, manipulate, influence, and punish data subjects.
- With the DPDP 2023, the cause of data privacy, individual data protection, limiting the use and extent of data, and even establishing the right to be forgotten—which establishes time restrictions on the amount of time data can be stored in a system—is furthered.
The DPDP Act, 2023 guarantees government and private institutions’ accountability:
- All of these improvements are positive and should hold government agencies and commercial companies more accountable for making their data practises more transparent, agreeable, and comprehensible.
- Even while it is unthinkable to tear down the big-data institutions that have taken control of our digital lives, the DPDP’s mandated protections and demands for justice and fairness are much needed, if idealistic.
There are three de facto principles of digital data:
- It ignores the ethics of data collection and collecting by portraying data as merely a description or information about people and phenomena.
- Digital data is constantly leaked by us. Not only does this data explain our actions, but it also helps establish our identities and foretells the types of subjects we will work with.
- We must give data generation more consideration in data regulation since it is just as important a site of regulation as data circulation and utilisation.
- The notion that data is a commodity is strengthened by the overemphasis on the economic value and application of data.
- It doesn’t challenge the requirement to avoid datafication of our private and personal lives or the necessity of certain types of data.
- It is assumed that all data can be produced, collected, and valued solely for its financial worth.
- This exposes the embodied nature of data. It has an impact on and is ingrained in our physical practises, therefore we must have a better knowledge of what counts as data and what does not, as well as how to create boundaries for what counts as data.
- Limiting the duration and boundaries of data: Although data can move, it is not certain that it will do so quickly enough or far enough to alienate the subject, establishing a digital and temporal gap that makes permission unnecessary or impossible.
- Legal academics and courts have argued that data must be viewed as an inalienable resource, much like life and dignity. We must take their advice to heart.
- During the operationalization of data, rules governing the maximum distance that data can travel without losing its origin and consent must be revised.
In summary:
- Although the DPDP Act 2023 is a historic step for India—a country that still holds the record for having the largest biometric citizen database in the world—it must be viewed as a preliminary draught that will build data equality and justice because it lacks a general framework to regulate the use of digital data and personal privacy.
Only until the operational realities challenge and scrutinise the three tenets that are frequently employed to weaponize data against the most vulnerable and precarious will the goals of the DPDP Act 2023 be realised.
