Govt to meet industry associations, tech policy groups to discuss DPDP Rules

The government will meet with industry associations, technology policy groups, lawyers, and other stakeholders here in the city on Tuesday to discuss the draft of the executive rules of the Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act. The union minister for electronics and information technology Ashwini Vaishnaw, along with the minister of state for electronics and information technology Jitin Prasada and other ministry officials are scheduled to attend the discussion.

A draft of the much-awaited rules to administer the provisions of the DPDP Act was released earlier this month and the government has sought stakeholder comments till February 18.

As per the draft of the rules, any user below the age of 18, will require verifiable parental consent to access social media. Further, the rules have, for the first time, proposed to place data fiduciaries under three broad categories of e-commerce companies, gaming intermediaries, and social media firms.

The rules also mandate that they must delete the personal data of inactive users on their platforms after three years. In case of a data breach, data fiduciaries will have to inform the Data Protection Board within 72 hours.

Organisations hit with a breach will have to inform the board with details such as the nature and extent of the breach, the persons or events responsible for the breach, remedial measures being taken, and a report regarding the information given to the users of the platform impacted by the breach.

Under the new rules, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology has proposed that all data fiduciaries adopt appropriate technical and organisational measures to ensure that verifiable parental consent is obtained before the processing of any personal data of a child.