Digital Constitutionalism And The Challenge To Constitutional Values In The Digital Era
- IJLLR Journal
- 3 hours ago
- 1 min read
Aditya Singh & Shiv Bhushan Singh, St. Aloysius Institute of Technology and National Law University, Odisha
ABSTRACT
Digital technologies have created a complete transformation of power structures which now present new constitutional issues that existing legal systems cannot address. Traditional constitutional arrangements were built to constrain visible exercises of state authority through legal text, institutional checks, and judicial enforcement. The digital era, by contrast, utilizes hidden control methods which use data collection and algorithmic processing together with infrastructural design choices to control human behavior without needing laws or court approval. The constitutional focus of this matter requires a doctrinal solution which needs to move past judicial reactions toward active engagement with the basic elements of digital governance.
Digital constitutionalism functions as the framework which enables the confirmation of constitutional values in digital spaces. This research investigates how privacy rights and data protection laws and digital rights management systems create constitutional challenges which particularly affect the Indian constitutional framework. The article maintains that constitutional protections need to be redefined because they must restrict both government officials and private technological systems which function as governing technologies that produce governmental effects similar to legislative frameworks. The Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023 and the Supreme Court decision in Justice K.S. Puttaswamy (Retd.) v. Union of India and the current court proceedings about the Aadhaar biometric identification system demonstrate how constitutional law must deal with digital power issues. The developments show how constitutional law develops through specific data-driven systems which dominate modern societies.
Keywords: Digital Constitutionalism, Right to Privacy, Data Protection and Surveillance, Digital Governance, Digital Rights Management (DRM), Indian Constitutional Law.
