Parents' Consent Must For Children's Social Media Accounts: Draft Data Rules

A child will need the consent of an adult for opening social media accounts, according to the draft rules proposed for the Digital Personal Data Protection Rules, 2025. The adult can be either a parent or a guardian, the draft rules say.

The Centre released the draft rules on Friday, and asked the public to send objections and suggestions. The public feedback can be submitted on mygov.in; the draft rules will be taken into consideration after February 18, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) said in a notification Friday.

The consent given to a child for opening social media accounts needs to be "verifiable", the rules say, adding processing of personal data of a child or of a person with disability will happen only with the "verifiable" consent.

"A data fiduciary shall adopt appropriate technical and organisational measures to ensure that verifiable consent of the parent is obtained before the processing of any personal data of a child and shall observe due diligence, for checking that the individual identifying herself as the parent is an adult who is identifiable if required in connection with compliance with any law for the time being in force in India...," the draft rules say.

Some of the salient features of the draft rules include greater consumer control over data; users can demand deletion of their data; companies should be more transparent with personal data; right for consumers to ask the reason why their data is being collected, and huge penalty of up to Rs 250 crore for data breach.

The rules define 'e-commerce entity' as any person who owns, operates or manages a digital facility or platform for e-commerce as defined in the Consumer Protection Act, 2019, but does not include a seller offering goods or services for sale on a marketplace e-commerce entity as defined in the said Act.

"Online gaming intermediary" means any intermediary who enables the users of its computer resource to access one or more online games, and "social media intermediary" means an intermediary as defined in the Information Technology Act, 2000 (21 of 2000) who primarily or solely enables online interaction between two or more users and allows them to create, upload, share, disseminate, modify or access information using her services.