The Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act establishes legal requirements for processing digital personal data in India. For engineering and security teams, compliance is primarily an architecture and observability challenge.
1. Data Minimization & Consent Telemetry
Startups must record verified consent prior to collecting personal data. From an engineering standpoint:
- Consent Ledger: Maintain an immutable log tracking when consent was granted, the exact purpose string shown to the user, and the timestamp.
- Payload Sanitization: Implement middleware to strip unneeded PII fields before payloads reach application services or caching layers.
2. Encryption at Rest & in Transit
All digital personal data must be encrypted under modern standards:
- Enforce TLS 1.3 across all public and internal service-to-service endpoints.
- Apply AES-256-GCM encryption for persistent storage, with keys rotated via a dedicated KMS (Key Management Service).
- Disallow plain-text PII in application logs, APM traces, and debugging dumps.
3. Incident Detection & 6-Hour Reporting Readiness
Under statutory directions, security incidents involving data breaches must be reported to CERT-In within 6 hours of identification.
- Automate severity classification in your SIEM or alerting system.
- Establish an escalation drill with pre-drafted incident disclosure templates.
- Maintain tamper-evident audit logs with synchronized NTP clocks.