DPDP Rules To Be Released For Public Consultation By September; Minor Verification Mechanism Still Unclear

• Ashwini Vaishnaw, the minister of electronics and information technology has indicated that the rules under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 ("DPDPA") will be released for public consultation by September and will there after be open for public consultation for a period of 45-60 days, which could be extended further to gather comprehensive feedback.
• In an internal meeting of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology("MeitY") held in July, which inter-alia included representatives of tech and social media companies including Google and Meta, MeitY proposed that the data fiduciaries should come up with a feasible mechanism for the age verification of minors by inculcating the best possible technologies, a mechanism which maythen be adopted as the industry standard for the purposes of minor verification. While MeitY had previously considered using either an Aadhaar based authentication through DigiLocker or a one-time electronic token based mechanism for the purposes of verification of minors, neither of these methods seemed feasible to concretely obtain foolproof parental consent, as required by the DPDPA.
• The National Commission for Protection of Child Rights ("NCPCR") also suggested the social media platforms, as well as to MeitY, to implement a KYC based verification procedure for minors for compliance under Section 9 of the DPDPA, and has also sought MeitY to include a clause for parental consent in the rules which are to be published for public consultation.
• However, in light of the technical challenges involved in the process of verifying parental consent for minors using digital services, the contentious issue relating to the verification mechanism for minors still remains unclear.

The content of this article is intended to provide a general guide to the subject matter. Specialist advice should be sought about your specific circumstances.