Meta is ready to comply with India’s privacy laws, but prohibits tracking of children’s use
Talk to it MintMeta’s vice president of policy and deputy chief privacy officer Rob Sherman said the company does not want its Indian business to be hampered due to the upcoming laws.
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“There are unique requirements for different laws around the world. We have established an internal process called regulatory preparation, which will inherently make choices and differences about our products globally. In this case, the DPDP ACT will require specific consent experiences we have established for India. It is a complex process, but it is a complex process, but a platform works differently in different regions,” Sherman said.
As part of this work, Sherman said the current protection of online behavior of underage users “is an important gap that is important to fill.”
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He added: “It makes sense in theory, but there is actually ambiguity. For example, we have systems that monitor abuse, or identify people who intend to hurt themselves. These things look at people’s behavior, and while we share India’s goal is to ensure people are safe online, the law has not anticipated this.”
March 5, Mint Meta has submitted its feedback to rules that will implement the DPDP Act of 2023, the report said. As part of the feedback, Meta raised concerns about the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MEITY) in tracking users’ Internet usage.
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At the time, a senior government official who knew the matter directly said the element was evaluating feedback and that a period of “two to three months” was expected before the law was enforced.
Sherman said compliance with the law could be “meaningful and complex” and he has been part of Mehta’s legal advice for years.
“There are significant areas of the DPDP Act that will have to be interpreted in its Rules. This will impact whether things are achieved. Beyond underage user tracking and profiling, there are many other key areas of compliance—for instance, the process of age verification has remained an open question. Each area has a dedicated global team within our ‘regulatory reading’ unit, which is working on making our apps compliant with India,” Sherman added.
Lawyers and policy experts in India largely agreed to the assessment of meta-assessment laws. “The general definition of the harmful effects of behavior tracking on children’s well-being under Section 9(2) of the DPDP Act 2023 lacks clarity on the general definition of “Detrimental Impact of Behavior Tracking on Children’s Well-being,” said Dhruv Garg, a partner at the Indian Governance and Policy Project (I-GAP), a public policy think tank.
Sherman further said that besides that, Mehta continued to “convene discussions with the government, detailing compliance plans to address specific areas of the law.”
“This helps us develop a compliance plan that will be developed over the course of many months. Areas such as data positioning and verifiable consent have high variability. However, India’s approach is consistent with the emergence of global consensus – based on age disclosures based on voluntary disclosures and subsequent challenges that require us, and if we are in the challenges that cross, we all need to challenge on the planet,” he said.
The executive also stressed that privacy regulations may not be used as a template to force copyright checks and queries to be performed in artificial intelligence (AI) models such as Meta’s own “Llama” home.
“We are building a set of models for global use, so unlike our platform, we don’t have the luxury of saying that the experience of using Llama in India may be different from another country. At this point, we are optimistic about the partnerships and summits of global AI, and the government has started to do a good job,” Sherman said. ”
There are currently no laws governing AI in India. While a series of previous proposed regulations suggest a way to impose protective measures to prevent cases of harm and bias in AI models, senior government officials say India has “enough existing regulations” to handle such cases, and specialized laws on AI are “imminent”.
“It is important not to over-regulate the technology. We first look at how most technology companies, including most technology companies, comply with the DPDP ACT, and in the long run, we will evaluate our further needs.”
