Digital Personal Data Protection Bill: Spectre of a Barbenheimer future

An Oppenheimer-style future will be founded on stubborn faith in technology to manage all aspects of the polity. Digital technologies, often with high-risks, will be seen as the path to sovereignty, domination, progress and empowerment. Like the men behind Oppenheimer’s atomic bomb, a privileged group of technical experts, bureaucrats, and politicians will get to choose which technologies India should adopt and how. Laws will become a smokescreen for protection, as privacy and other rights routinely succumb to security and nation-building interests. Surveillance, data leaks and various forms of exclusion will be routine social realities, bitter pills to be swallowed for the greatest good of the greatest number.

In parallel, citizens will find solace in a Barbie-like metaverse curated by large tech corporations. In this escapist world, life will be experienced through rose-tinted glasses, surrounded by like-minded Barbies and Kens, imagining the rights of our choosing. But this will of course be only a simulated environment powered by virtual reality and artificial intelligence. Personal data will be the fodder and the yield of this hyper-personalised ecosystem. In the process, digital citizens would either be treated as subjects, to be “protected” and overseen by the state or users, to be entertained and surveilled by corporations.

In contrast, the equitable digital future will be citizen-centric by design. Its equity will reflect in the relationship between citizens and the state and their interactions with responsible private actors. This imagination assumes that in the immediate future India will adopt a sound legal structure for data protection supported by an independent data protection agency. Unlike the current version, this law will offer meaningful protections that apply equally to the private sector and state agencies. It will not carve broad exceptions in the name of national security and law enforcement or create backdoors for government access. In parallel, comprehensive surveillance reforms will guarantee that citizens’ privacy is protected by judicial oversight and robust procedural safeguards.

Beyond privacy, the digital rights toolkit would have also evolved in many other ways. India will have universal digital access, a sophisticated cyber security apparatus, nuanced jurisprudence on online speech and expression, and a sound framework for AI governance. All these instruments would have emerged through open engagement with stakeholders, prioritising human rights, accountability and trust.

A shift in societal attitudes will complement these legal and institutional changes. Well before 2047, assertion and respect for privacy will be ingrained in everyday life. Digital safety and data empowerment will be part of school curriculums and in family conversations. In that future, it will be unimaginable for a group of individuals to subject someone to the kind of indignity that recently surfaced in Manipur, whether online or offline. WhatsApp conversations flashing on news media and rash internet shutdowns will similarly become historical ills that were overcome through socio-legal-political reforms.

The equitable digital future will also gain from the advancement of privacy enhancing technologies. Encrypted data processing will be the norm for all transactions and data anonymisation techniques would have evolved significantly. India will also leverage its experience in building digital public goods to pursue meaningful data empowerment. The current version of such an architecture is limited to collecting user consent electronically and enabling data sharing. This design is arguably more empowering for data users than individuals. But maturity in India’s data protection regime will cause a bottom-up reimagining of such systems to foster greater agency for individuals and communities and accountability from data users.

With the new data protection law and the proposed Digital India Act, India is at an inflection point of digital governance. The choices we make today will influence where India will find itself in the next 25 years. This implies not just policy choices but also societal, technological and personal ones. Hopefully, the sum of these choices will land us somewhere closer to the equitable future imagined here than the Barbenheimer one.

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The writer is a fellow at the CyberBRICS Project, FGV Law School