Rule 4

Consent Manager registration opens13 Nov 2026

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A notice is not a privacy policy

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Section 5 of the DPDP Act sets out what a notice must say before consent is valid, including the right to withdraw and the 22 Eighth Schedule languages.

Section 5 is short, and it is the provision most consent implementations fail. It requires a notice given with, or before, a request for consent — not a link to a policy, and not a paragraph in terms of service that a person accepted at signup two years earlier.

What it has to say

The notice must set out the personal data to be collected and the purpose it will be processed for. Both are itemised, not summarised: "we collect data to improve our services" describes nothing a person can consent to. It must also tell the Data Principal three procedural things — how to withdraw consent, how to exercise their rights under the Act, and how to complain to the Data Protection Board.

Purpose is the unit

The Act ties consent to purpose, and it is per purpose rather than per organisation. A single consent covering "marketing, analytics and product improvement" is one consent doing three jobs, and withdrawing from one of them leaves the record ambiguous. Splitting purposes at the point of notice is what makes selective withdrawal expressible later.

The language right sits with the reader

A Data Principal may ask for the notice in English or in any of the 22 languages of the Eighth Schedule. This is a right of the reader, not an option the Data Fiduciary exercises when convenient, and translating only the interface while leaving the notice in English does not satisfy it. Machine translation of a statutory notice carries its own risk: the notice is the document the consent rests on, and a mistranslated purpose is a defective purpose.

Why this is an evidence problem

At the moment a complaint is filed, the question will not be whether you had a notice. It will be which version of the notice a specific person saw, in which language, on which date, before giving a consent you are now relying on. That is a record-keeping requirement disguised as a drafting requirement, and it is far cheaper to build at the start than to reconstruct.

Questions people ask

What must a DPDP notice contain?
Under Sec. 5, the notice must describe the personal data being collected and the purpose for which it will be processed, and it must tell the Data Principal how to withdraw consent, how to exercise their rights under the Act, and how to complain to the Data Protection Board.
Does the notice have to be in a local language?
The Data Principal has the right to receive the notice in English or in any language listed in the Eighth Schedule to the Constitution, which is 22 languages. The choice belongs to the Data Principal, not the Data Fiduciary.
Can a privacy policy serve as the notice?
Not on its own. A privacy policy describes an organisation's practices in general. Sec. 5 requires an itemised notice tied to the specific personal data and the specific purpose being consented to at that moment.
Does an existing consent need a fresh notice?
Yes. Sec. 5(2) requires a Data Fiduciary to give a notice for consent obtained before the Act commenced, as soon as is reasonably practicable, and permits processing to continue until the Data Principal withdraws. The existing base stays lawful, but it has to be noticed.