Data Protection Bill: Govt Sticks With 18 Years Of Age For Minors, May Review It Next Year

The government will reportedly retain 18 years of age as the threshold to define minors under the proposed Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Bill.

Those under the age of 18 years will be defined as minors under the Bill, however, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) plans to review this age limit a year after the enactment of the Bill to assuage concerns of big tech players.

At the centre of the row is the age limit for the classification of users as ‘children’. While the Centre has stuck to its guns of keeping 18 years as the cut-off, tech giants such as Google, Meta, Snap and others sought lowering it to 16. Once implemented, the norms will mandate that these players obtain explicit parental consent before processing any data belonging to minors.

A senior official told The Economic Times that while parents sought 18 as the age limit, other stakeholders called for lowering the age bar. “But right now, the age cut-off will be 18. We may lower it to say 16 a year after the (DPDP) Bill is in place,” added the official.

MeitY sources further added that the move to review the threshold after a year would be the government’s way of ‘reassuring companies’ in the edtech and other children-focused content platforms.

Ever since the launch of the draft Bill last year, tech giants have been lobbying with the Centre to lower the age to 16 owing to much of their educational and informative content being targeted at children. Seeking parental consent would involve setting up complex safeguards and limit the market opportunity for the players. 

This is part of a sweeping draft Bill that also puts the onus on big tech companies to ensure that the data of ‘children’ is not processed in a way that it harms minors. The proposed norms also bar data fiduciaries from undertaking behavioural monitoring of children or deploy advertising directed at minors. 

This is the third iteration of the digital data protection Bill. The first draft, unveiled in 2019, was dropped after being in limbo for more than three years. Afterwards, another version of the proposed norms was pulled back by the government over privacy concerns. Eventually, the third version was unveiled last year to differentiate between personal data and non-personal data.

The announcements come alongside a bevy of other related developments and proposals announced by the government to revamp the digital regulatory landscape. From Digital India Act to Telecommunications Bill, 2022, a clutch of norms are currently under discussion or in the public domain. Over the course of this year, the government could introduce the proposed Bills in the Parliament.