Artificial Intelligence, Data Protection And Privacy: Emerging Challenges Under Indian Cyber Law
- IJLLR Journal
- 6 days ago
- 2 min read
Sanskriti Sinha & Rudra Jaiswal, B.A. LL.B. (Hons.), Amity Law School, Amity University, Gwalior, Madhya Pradesh, India
ABSTRACT
India now regulates artificial intelligence with a statute that was not written for it. The Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, whose substantive provisions become enforceable on 13 May 2027, rests on a transactional model in which an identified fiduciary collects identified data from an identified individual for a stated purpose. Machine learning inverts almost every element of that model. Corpora are assembled by scraping rather than solicitation, purposes are discovered after collection rather than declared before it, and the data most likely to injure a person is often not data collected at all but data the model has inferred. This paper examines that mismatch across the Indian framework, reading the DPDP Act with the Rules of 2025, the surviving provisions of the Information Technology Act, 2000, the intermediary guidelines as amended in February 2026, and the India AI Governance Guidelines. It identifies a set of specific difficulties, among them the exclusion of publicly available personal data under section 3(c)(ii), the impossibility of erasure once data has been absorbed into model weights, the absence of any statutory definition of anonymisation, the omission of a right to an explanation for automated decisions, and the withdrawal of the compensation remedy that section 43A of the Information Technology Act had provided. It argues that the courts, working through personality rights litigation, have outpaced the legislature, and that this is an unstable substitute for statutory protection because it is available in practice only to the famous. It closes with reforms that fit India’s sector-led approach.
Keywords: Artificial Intelligence; Data Protection; Privacy; DPDP Act 2023; Information Technology Act 2000; Deepfakes; Algorithmic Accountability; Cyber Law.
