MediaNama’s Take:
The demand to exempt AI training from the Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act raises serious concerns. The Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) frames this as a question of national competitiveness, claiming India must ease restrictions on publicly available personal data to keep pace with the US and China. But this framing avoids deeper questions.
Just because data is public does not mean it must be scraped or used to train AI. Online content often carries unspoken expectations of context, privacy, and limited scope. Ignoring these boundaries risks profiling, misuse, and context collapse. The IAMAI’s submission apparently treats personal data as infrastructure, not something grounded in individual rights.
India’s data protection law already permits limited use of public data. But instead of seeking clarity on ambiguous cases, the submission calls for a sweeping exemption that would allow any data fiduciary to train AI models on any public data without conditions. That could weaken the law even before enforcement begins.
Its comparison with China also misses the mark. India’s neighbour may allow broad data use for training, but it tightly regulates outputs to align with state ideology. India cannot adopt China’s data access model without accepting its censorship framework.
The idea that innovation depends on minimal regulation is flawed. Innovation built on unchecked personal data use is unstable. A rights-based approach may move more slowly, but it pushes companies to design systems that are safer and more accountable from the start.
India does not need to mimic China or deregulate like the US. Instead, it needs a balanced framework that respects user rights as well as enables AI growth. However, the current IAMAI proposal leaves little room for this middle ground.
What’s the News
IAMAI has written to the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), seeking exemptions under the DPDP Act, 2023, for companies training AI models. It argues that ambiguities in Section 3(c)(ii), which excludes some categories of publicly available personal data from the law’s scope, may restrict innovation in India’s AI ecosystem.
IAMAI urges the government to either amend the Act or use powers under Section 17(5) to exempt AI developers from compliance when processing publicly available data for training. It claims that restrictions will raise entry barriers, increase development costs, and stifle innovation.
What the IAMAI Submission Says
MediaNama reviewed IAMAI’s submission to MeitY. The letter focuses on Section 3(c)(ii), which excludes personal data made public by the data principal or disclosed under legal obligation. While it welcomes this exclusion, it says the current language creates compliance risks.
Two specific concerns are raised,
- Voluntary Disclosure : It is difficult to verify whether someone voluntarily made their data public….
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