"Nobody should control the end user": Exploring Privacy Perspectives of Indian Internet Users in Light of DPDPA

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2508.17962v1
• Date: Mon, 25 Aug 2025 12:22:25 GMT
• Title: "Nobody should control the end user": Exploring Privacy Perspectives of Indian Internet Users in Light of DPDPA
• Authors: Sana Athar, Devashish Gosain, Anja Feldmann, Mannat Kaur, Ha Dao,
• Abstract summary: We explore Indian Internet users' awareness and perceptions of cookie banners, online privacy, and privacy regulations, especially in light of the newly passed DPDPA.<n>Our findings reveal that privacy-conscious users often lack consistent awareness of privacy mechanisms.<n>Our study highlights the need for clearer communication regarding the DPDPA, user-centric consent mechanisms, and policy refinements to enhance data privacy practices in India.
• Score: 2.6885436577568904
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: With the rapid increase in online interactions, concerns over data privacy and transparency of data processing practices have become more pronounced. While regulations like the GDPR have driven the widespread adoption of cookie banners in the EU, India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act (DPDPA) promises similar changes domestically, aiming to introduce a framework for data protection. However, certain clauses within the DPDPA raise concerns about potential infringements on user privacy, given the exemptions for government accountability and user consent requirements. In this study, for the first time, we explore Indian Internet users' awareness and perceptions of cookie banners, online privacy, and privacy regulations, especially in light of the newly passed DPDPA. We conducted an online anonymous survey with 428 Indian participants, which addressed: (1) users' perspectives on cookie banners, (2) their attitudes towards online privacy and privacy regulations, and (3) their acceptance of 10 contentious DPDPA clauses that favor state authorities and may enable surveillance. Our findings reveal that privacy-conscious users often lack consistent awareness of privacy mechanisms, and their concerns do not always lead to protective actions. Our thematic analysis of 143 open ended responses shows that users' privacy and data protection concerns are rooted in skepticism towards the government, shaping their perceptions of the DPDPA and fueling demands for policy revisions. Our study highlights the need for clearer communication regarding the DPDPA, user-centric consent mechanisms, and policy refinements to enhance data privacy practices in India.

Related papers

• Your Privacy Depends on Others: Collusion Vulnerabilities in Individual Differential Privacy [50.66105844449181]
  Individual Differential Privacy (iDP) promises users control over their privacy, but this promise can be broken in practice.<n>We reveal a previously overlooked vulnerability in sampling-based iDP mechanisms.<n>We propose $(varepsilon_i,_i,overline)$-iDP a privacy contract that uses $$-divergences to provide users with a hard upper bound on their excess vulnerability.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-01-19T10:26:12Z)
• Understanding Users' Security and Privacy Concerns and Attitudes Towards Conversational AI Platforms [3.789219860006095]
  We conduct a large-scale analysis of over 2.5M user posts from the r/ChatGPT Reddit community to understand users' security and privacy concerns.<n>We find that users are concerned about each stage of the data lifecycle (i.e., collection, usage, and retention)<n>We provide recommendations for users, platforms, enterprises, and policymakers to enhance transparency, improve data controls, and increase user trust and adoption.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-04-09T03:22:48Z)
• Perception of Digital Privacy Protection: An Empirical Study using GDPR Framework [0.22628031081632272]
  This study investigates people perception of digital privacy protection of government data using the General Data Protection Perception Regulation ( systems dichotomy) framework. Findings suggest a dichotomy in perception in protecting people privacy rights. The right to object by granting and with-drawing consent is perceived as the least protected. Second, the study shows evidence of a social dilemma in people perception of digital privacy based on their context and culture.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-11-19T04:36:31Z)
• Fingerprinting and Tracing Shadows: The Development and Impact of Browser Fingerprinting on Digital Privacy [55.2480439325792]
  Browser fingerprinting is a growing technique for identifying and tracking users online without traditional methods like cookies. This paper gives an overview by examining the various fingerprinting techniques and analyzes the entropy and uniqueness of the collected data.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-11-18T20:32:31Z)
• PrivacyLens: Evaluating Privacy Norm Awareness of Language Models in Action [54.11479432110771]
  PrivacyLens is a novel framework designed to extend privacy-sensitive seeds into expressive vignettes and further into agent trajectories.<n>We instantiate PrivacyLens with a collection of privacy norms grounded in privacy literature and crowdsourced seeds.<n>State-of-the-art LMs, like GPT-4 and Llama-3-70B, leak sensitive information in 25.68% and 38.69% of cases, even when prompted with privacy-enhancing instructions.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-08-29T17:58:38Z)
• Privacy Policies and Consent Management Platforms: Growth and Users' Interactions over Time [4.356242302111725]
  Consent platforms (CMPs) have emerged as practical solutions to make it easier for website administrators to manage user consent. This paper presents a detailed analysis of the evolution of CMPs spanning nine years. We observe how even small changes in the design of Privacy Banners have a critical impact on the user's giving or denying their consent to data collection.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-02-28T13:36:27Z)
• A Critical Take on Privacy in a Datafied Society [0.0]
  I analyze several facets of the lack of online privacy and idiosyncrasies exhibited by privacy advocates. I discuss of possible effects of datafication on human behavior, the prevalent market-oriented assumption at the base of online privacy, and some emerging adaptation strategies. A glimpse on the likely problematic future is provided with a discussion on privacy related aspects of EU, UK, and China's proposed generative AI policies.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-08-03T11:45:18Z)
• Privacy Explanations - A Means to End-User Trust [64.7066037969487]
  We looked into how explainability might help to tackle this problem. We created privacy explanations that aim to help to clarify to end users why and for what purposes specific data is required. Our findings reveal that privacy explanations can be an important step towards increasing trust in software systems.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2022-10-18T09:30:37Z)
• Second layer data governance for permissioned blockchains: the privacy management challenge [58.720142291102135]
  In pandemic situations, such as the COVID-19 and Ebola outbreak, the action related to sharing health data is crucial to avoid the massive infection and decrease the number of deaths. In this sense, permissioned blockchain technology emerges to empower users to get their rights providing data ownership, transparency, and security through an immutable, unified, and distributed database ruled by smart contracts.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2020-10-22T13:19:38Z)
• Private Reinforcement Learning with PAC and Regret Guarantees [69.4202374491817]
  We design privacy preserving exploration policies for episodic reinforcement learning (RL) We first provide a meaningful privacy formulation using the notion of joint differential privacy (JDP) We then develop a private optimism-based learning algorithm that simultaneously achieves strong PAC and regret bounds, and enjoys a JDP guarantee.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2020-09-18T20:18:35Z)
• The Challenges and Impact of Privacy Policy Comprehension [0.0]
  This paper experimentally manipulated the privacy-friendliness of an unavoidable and simple privacy policy. Half of our participants miscomprehended even this transparent privacy policy. To mitigate such pitfalls we present design recommendations to improve the quality of informed consent.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2020-05-18T14:16:48Z)

This list is automatically generated from the titles and abstracts of the papers in this site.

This site does not guarantee the quality of this site (including all information) and is not responsible for any consequences.