Verifiable parental consent is crucial for protecting children’s data privacy, but its implementation in India under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act faces significant hurdles.
Even with the individual’s age verified, identifying and reaching out to their parents for consent presents a formidable challenge.
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By Ashok Hariharan
Verifiable parental consent has emerged as a cornerstone in global privacy laws for safeguarding children’s data. However, implementing such a system in India under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act (DPDPA) presents significant challenges. This blog explores why verifiable parental consent is not currently feasible in India, delving into technical constraints, existing solutions in other countries, and potential pathways for the DPDPA to draw inspiration.
Two-Part Solution to Parental Consent
To understand the complexity, let’s break down the solution into two essential parts:
- Age Gating: Verifying whether an individual is below or above 18 years old
- Identifying the Parent and Seeking Consent: Once a child is identified, obtaining consent from their parent or guardian
The Challenge Of Age-Gating
Aadhaar Demographic API Limitations
The Aadhaar Demographic API, a primary tool for identity verification in India, falls short when it comes to precise age gating. While it can confirm if an individual falls within certain age bands, the granularity is insufficient for determining specific ages such as 18 or 20. The API typically returns age bands in multiples of 10, making it impractical to identify individuals between 18 and 20 years old.
OCR Techniques for Proof of Identity
As a workaround, Optical Character Recognition (OCR) techniques can be employed to extract age details from various identification documents like Aadhaar, PAN, or passports. However, this introduces another layer of complexity. Despite OCR’s ability to read and digitise text from physical documents, it does not solve the fundamental issue: identifying and contacting the parents for consent.
The Parent Identification Conundrum
Even with the individual’s age verified, identifying and reaching out to their parents for consent presents a formidable challenge.
Indian identity documents do not typically include contact information for parents. Therefore, once a minor’s age is confirmed, there’s no straightforward method to identify and verify the parent’s identity and contact information.
The Global Perspective: How Other Countries Address Age Gating & Parental Consent
United States: COPPA
The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) requires verifiable parental consent for children under 13. Methods include signed consent forms, credit card transactions, and video calls, leveraging direct and indirect means to ensure the parent’s involvement.
European Union: GDPR
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) mandates parental consent for processing data of children under 16 (or lower, as set by individual countries). Techniques include digital signatures, verification emails, and two-factor authentication, ensuring robust verification processes.
United Kingdom: Age-Appropriate Design Code
Under the UK’s Age-Appropriate Design Code, online services must ensure age-appropriate design and obtain parental consent. Techniques like educational institution verification and secure document uploads are employed to verify parental consent effectively.
Potential Pathways For DPDPA
To address these challenges, the DPDPA can draw inspiration from these global practices:
- Enhanced API Capabilities: Improving the Aadhaar Demographic API to provide precise age verification, similar to age-specific checks used in other jurisdictions.
- Parental Identification Mechanisms: Developing a comprehensive database or integration with existing government systems to facilitate parent identification and contact.
- Multi-Factor Verification: Implementing robust multi-factor authentication methods, including biometric verification and secure digital signatures, to ensure the validity of parental consent.
- Collaborative Verification: Partnering with educational institutions and other trusted entities to aid in the verification process, ensuring a broader reach and more reliable consent mechanisms.
- Consent Manager and KYC: Utilising consent managers to perform a one-time Know Your Customer (KYC) process for both parent and child, leveraging existing KYC frameworks to verify identities and consent.
- Web3 Implementation of Verifiable Credentials: Adopting Web3 technologies to create and manage verifiable credentials for both children and parents. This decentralised approach ensures secure, tamper-proof records of consent that can be easily verified across platforms.
Crucial, But Implementation Faces Hurdles
Verifiable parental consent is crucial for protecting children’s data privacy, but its implementation in India under the DPDPA faces significant hurdles. The limitations of the Aadhaar Demographic API and the absence of reliable methods to identify and contact parents underscore the need for innovative solutions. By drawing inspiration from global practices, the DPDPA can evolve to incorporate robust age verification and parental consent mechanisms, ensuring compliance and enhancing data protection for children in India.
In embracing these global strategies, India can move towards a more secure and privacy-compliant digital landscape for its youngest citizens.
(The author is the CEO & Co-founder of IDfy)
Disclaimer: The opinions, beliefs, and views expressed by the various authors and forum participants on this website are personal and do not reflect the opinions, beliefs, and views of ABP Network Pvt. Ltd.
