The government has prepared the draft of the rules proposed to be enacted under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, which it will release for public consultation in the second or third week of August. It is expected that the rules will get notified right after the current session of the Parliament is over.

It should give the citizens of the country an effective mechanism to safeguard their privacy without being reduced to a tool for filing frivolous complaints. “We will have extensive consultations for the rules. Our approach has been very measured and we have kept the text very simple. The idea is not to disrupt anything,” a senior government official told ET.

Under the DPDP Act, any person below 18 years is considered a child, and social media or internet intermediaries—a term replaced by data fiduciaries—are required to obtain explicit parental consent before processing any personal data of children. It lays down the rights and duties of data principals, obligations of data fiduciaries, penalties for data breaches, and also creates a special category of data fiduciaries known as the significant data fiduciaries.