Data Privacy and Targeted Advertising: Marketing Compliance under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 in the Global Regulatory Landscape

Abstract

The Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023 is a groundbreaking move in the regulatory landscape of India as it creates a stronger paradigm on how the personal data processing works, which is aligned with various global regulations such as the GDPR. It is a fundamental recalibration of the relationship between corporate bodies and consumers since this legislation requires the principles of transparency, consent, and data minimization. Moreover, this legislative change is putting the digital economy in India in line with the worldwide privacy regulations, and a stringent re-consideration of algorithmic profiling and data-driven advertising patterns is necessary. In this regard, the Act requires a strict review of cross-border data transfer protocols that provide the central government with powers to introduce constraints which can explicitly affect the operational scaling of global advertising ecosystem. This means that companies should move away with the use of the traditional third-party tracking to privacy-oriented design, including first-party data architecture, to conform to the provisions of the Act in terms of purpose limitation and accountability. In particular, the presence of consent managers as part of the Data Empowerment and Protection Architecture can be used to address the problems of consent fatigue and support inter-fiduciary data flows in a secure and interoperable manner. This development has been driven by a wider move by companies worldwide towards not being dependent on cookies to track people but rather having to enter into the legal labyrinth of inter-legal work between the EU and its GDPR, the US system, and the new statutory system in India. This regulatory convergence highlights the need to harmonize the benefit -risk trade-off of online behavioral-advertising and ensure that statutory privacy protections are not overridden by the desire of developing targeted engagement.