Tech solutions can help verify kids' age: Minister

IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said on Tuesday that the country has technological solutions to verify children's age online, leveraging its digital infrastructure to implement the new draft data protection rules' parental consent requirements even as he conceded that verifiable parental consent is a global problem.

- Aditi Agrawal

The minister's comments come against the backdrop of experts questioning how entities processing children's data are supposed to obtain parental consent, especially without putting in a system mandating widespread age and identity verification of all users. "What luckily we have in our country because of Digital India programme, Aadhaar and payment system is a lot of digitalisation. There is a very good digital architecture," Vaishnaw said.

The minister outlined how virtual tokens, an industry-proposed solution that has worked "very well in the case of account aggregators and Aadhaar verification," could verify identities. These tokens would be built by the industry and deleted after use, he contended. "Let's say you have a 16-digit Aadhaar number and you have a particular address in the school. Against this, a virtual token can be created," he explained, adding that multiple systems including APAAR ID and state-level family IDs could be integrated.