The Right To Be Forgotten For Children In India: Can Juveniles Ever Escape Their Digital Past?
Shambhabi Mohapatra, Siksha O Anusandhan, BBSR
ABSTRACT
Both India's data protection and juvenile justice regimes offer a fresh start for children, but neither in a digitally networked society. The Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, is mainly designed to protect children in the context of data collection, with the presumption that data processing will be made only with the consent of the parents, and bans behavioral tracking and targeted advertising for children. The Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2015, provides for the protection of children following adjudication, the sealing of records and the non-identification of children in conflict with the law in a report. Both laws are limited to institutional actors such as data fiduciaries, courts, police, as well as media outlets and do not offer any means to force deleting or de-indexing of data that third parties have already made public or shared about an identifiable child. This note investigates the issues with this implementation. It asserts that the erasure right in the DPDP Act is not mandatory, but rather based on consent, that the confidentiality requirement in the Juvenile Justice Act only applies to certain institutional parties, and that there is no statutory connection between a Juvenile Justice Board's rehabilitation or closure order and a takedown requirement on platforms that publish identifying content.. The idea offered in the note is quite limited and easy to put into practice, a statutory presumption of de-indexing that is triggered automatically when a Board is closed, and is instead a power for the Board to call for, not the person, who is now an adult. This shifts the focus to those the law is supposed to protect and makes the best interests of the child a legal criterion rather than an aspirational one.
