PDPA Act guides people in choosing the ways to protect their data and teaches us what are the ways to process personal data from a law perspective. PDPA is the Digital Personal Data Protection Act. As per this act, every person has the right to protect their personal information. PDPA has special provisions for children and disabled people. Let’s discuss them here.
PDPA: Perspective for Personal Data of Child
PDPA considers the age below 18 years as a child. In other jurisdictions such as the European Union, they consider the child who is aged less than 16 years. The other act- GDPR- General Data Protection Regulation has specified the child’s age as below 13 years.
Now, coming back to PDPA, section 9 of the act has the provisions to process the personal data of the child. The act specified that it is required to obtain the consent of parents if there is any data related to the child.
The PDPA act does not give permission to process any data related to the child which may cause any detrimental effect on the child. As per the act, we can not track or monitor the behavior of the child. For example, we can not target children while advertising.
Analysis
Verifiable Parental Consent
The PDPA Act gives the term verifiable parental consent- VPC but this act does not give us the definition of VPC. It is enforced that the consent of the parents of the child is needed if we are dealing with the child’s data. Now, the authorities have to build some procedures or guidelines to obtain the consent of parents.
The US govt has built the guidelines for verifiable parental consent- VPC with the help of the Federal Trade Commission. These guidelines include the process of obtaining physical consent from the parent and the parent will send the consent hard copy by post or also can use the email method. Consent can be taken using the toll-free number or video call. The companies can take consent using knowledge-based question-answer forms, keeping the govt ID of the parent, and facial recognition can also be taken for consent.
The people in the US do not support the FTC guidelines for parent consent as the process of consent is lengthy and will take time and money. However, the parents are in favor of these consent forms, they insist that proper consent methods should exist to achieve the objective of COPPA.
The govt can follow one method named platform-mediated verifiable parental consent. In this method, a special platform will be developed to take the consent of parents and it will uniformly flag the users who are underage.
The Indian government is also required to think of the best possible ways to obtain the consent of the parents. The age of the child is crucial as the maturity level of 5-year the child is extremely different from a 13-year child. Children who are only 10 years of age and have social media accounts like Facebook should be flagged by the VPC.
Bar on processing
PDPA has made it a punishable offense if anybody uses the personal data of the children in a way that has a detrimental effect on the child. The organizations are not allowed to track the personal data of the child and they can not monitor the behavior of the person.
The Detrimental effect is described as the adverse effects on the child like if the physical or mental of the child is affected. The govt has a focus on the well-being of the child. This is defined in the US law but the PDPA has not elaborated the Detrimental effect related to the child.
As the term is not fully described people have misconceptions about the Detrimental effect. Some think that if the child use social media their mental health is automatically degraded. Social media ask for the age of the person before the registration and they allow only the age group above 13 years to have an account.
But PDPA has defined the age of 18 years, now the age group of 13 years to 18 years will have accounts on social media and the social websites will collect data on the children from 13 to 18 years. It will lead to poor mental health of the teenagers. It is required to more elaborate on the PDPA Act.
The otehr scenario of online coaching is where they track the behavior of students who are below the age of 18 years. This can affect the children negatively. Another is the advertisement that targets only children. Some game companies only target children and children download games without knowing the consequences. This is also affecting the mental health of the child.
Conclusion
PDPA is a great initiative of the Indian Govt to protect the data of the children. The PDPA act will also support the disabled people in India. Although this act needs more clarification in certain areas as we discussed above it will definitely help the child health.