Privacy in the Digital Age: A Critical Study of the DPDP Act 2023 and Its Implications
Author(s): Praveen Yadav & Rajesh Yadav
Abstract: The right to privacy has become one of the significant rights of the digital era and is strictly connected with human dignity, autonomy, and free choice. As the internet, artificial intelligence, and big data continue to grow at incredible rates, corporations, governments, and digital platforms are gathering, storing, and analysing personal data in scale. This has brought great concerns on the issue of surveillance, profiling and misuse of data. In India, the awareness of a right to privacy as a priority provided in the Constitution under Article 21 of the Constitution in Justice K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India (2017) developed a constitutional directive of a robust data protection framework. In reaction to this, the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 (DPDP Act) was made the first national law to deal exclusively with digital personal data. The Act provides rights of individuals, responsibilities of organizations and a Data Protection Board to oversee it. It also concerns questions such as consent, cross-border data transfer, and the penalties for violation. Nonetheless, it is left with loopholes, including broad government exemptions, no special protection of sensitive data, and worries about the independence of the regulator. In this work, the DPDP Act is critically analysed in comparison with international standards and discussed as to whether it is appropriate to balance privacy, state power, and digital innovations.
Keywords: Privacy Rights, DPDP Act, Data Protection Board of India, Global Data Protection Frameworks, Surveillance and Profiling.
DOI: doi.org/10.65719/RC.3.2.2025.032
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