Indian Internet Users Data Protected: Generative AI Platforms Won’t Be Allowed Access, Suggests Proposed Law

Published: Monday, July 17, 2023, 19:07 [IST]

Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) platforms such as ChatGPT or Google’s Bard have been scraping data in huge amounts. However, these companies and their AI tools may not be allowed to process the personal data of Indians available in the public domain.

A new leaked draft of the Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Bill, 2023, strongly suggests Indian government won’t allow access to data of the country’s citizenry. Incidentally, the bill was approved by the cabinet earlier this month, but a few amendments point to the protection from data scraping.

New Draft Of DPDP Bill Drops Clause That Granted Exemption To Search Engines

Companies like Google, Microsoft (or OpenAI), and several others that are developing Generative AI platforms, are scraping huge amounts of publicly available data on the internet. Humongous quantities of such scraped data are being fed to Large Language Models (LLMs) to train the Generative AI platforms.

Tech giants are shielding themselves from any potential legal trouble by claiming they are accessing only openly accessible data, which is available in the public domain. Needless to say, not everybody is happy.

Twitter’s Elon Musk openly called out tech companies that had been scraping data from the micro-blogging network. It appears, the Indian government too is taking steps to shield the data of millions of internet users.

The personal data of Indians that is present in the public domain might be shielded from processing by Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) platforms, according to the latest draft of the Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Bill, 2023 that was sanctioned by the cabinet.

Specifically speaking, the most current version of the draft omits a clause that previously allowed search engines to process publicly available personal data of Indian internet users. Generative AI platform creators that collect such data for processing and training their platforms, could be inviting legal trouble.

Is India Following In The US’s footsteps To Try And Shield User Data?

Recently, the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) filed a lawsuit against ChatGPT’s creators. The agency was concerned about potential violations of consumer protection laws through scraping public data.

The FTC has also taken up a case against Amazon for allegedly enrolling customers into Amazon Prime without their consent, accusing them of employing “dark patterns”. Cumulatively, the FTC appears to be going after tech companies that aggressively collect and process user data.

India appears to be following the US and instead of lawsuits, the country appears to amending proposed laws to make it harder for tech companies to scrape data. Previously, the proposed DPDP bill had Clause 8(8), which acted as the facilitator for AI processing and machine learning.

The revised draft has a new Section 18, called “legitimate purposes”, which includes a similar concept but is more restrictive in nature. The current bill does not allow for the processing of user data for the operation of search engines, which is not specifically covered under Section 18.

If the leaked draft is approved and a law is formulated, all AI companies, including Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and even Musk’s XAI would require the Indian government’s permission to use the personal data of Indians even if the same is available in the public domain.

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