Privacy Law May Trip on Parent Verification

Parents of minors will need to take responsibility for the underage users

- Shouvik Das

The first draft rules of India's Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act, 2023 have raised concerns and confusion around its proposed idea of a parent needing to verify their identity when a child seeks to use an online platform.

Lawyers and policy consultants said that the proposed framework to verify whether an individual claiming to be an adult is so, on top of being related to a child, can cause complications for individuals, and become a burden for companies. It could also raise confusion, since the first draft of the DPDP rules do not define key terms such as 'detrimental', 'wellbeing', and 'due diligence'.

The rules, published in the public domain on Friday, need parents and guardians of minors, defined as below 18 years of age, to authenticate themselves as responsible for the underage users—using tokenized data or government identification through the Digilocker platform to do so.