Privacy in the digital age: A comparative study of India’s legal gaps and U.S. data protection frameworks

The ever-growing rate of the spread of digital technologies in India has required creating a strong legal framework to protect the information that can be considered personal. The Indian government reacted to it by passing the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 (DPDP Act), a major legislative action towards controlling the processing of personal data in the digital environment. Although the Act provides many fundamental principles that include consent, limitation of purposes, and duty of data fiduciaries, it also demonstrates several vital weaknesses. These are the fact that its definitions are vague and plentifully exception-ridden on the State side, it has little enforcement capabilities, over depends on the consent process, and did not include concrete individual redress channels. This paper takes a critical look at these gaps in the DPDP Act of India and how some of the issues generated by these gaps have been handled in the context of the developing state-level regime of data privacy in the United States. The absence of the federal privacy law leaves the U.S with a patchwork of estimates such as California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA), and the recent bills as enacted in Tennessee, Minnesota, Maryland, Indiana, Kentucky, and Rhode Island. These laws provide us with good lessons on how to strengthen consumer rights, the definition of sensitive data, restriction of data sales, and how to enforce the same by using independent authorities. Using comparative legal analysis, the research paper finds possible regulatory practices in the U.S. practice that can be used to help shape a more accountable, transparent and citizen-centred data protection regimes in India. It proposes amendments to make DPDP Act more readable, curb government snooping without checks, and provide data principals with rights that they can enforce and institutional independence. These results indicate that there is necessity to make India adapt its privacy regime to global best practices to achieve adherence to the values enshrined in the constitution and promote the development of trust in the digital economy.