The Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 is not perfect. There are many things I would have liked to change. But it has been enacted and it is the law we’ve been given. It is time to stop the hand-wringing and get on with working with what we have.

India’s new data protection law is simple and principle based. But it will require companies big and small to make radical changes to the way they operate. And I don’t think businesses fully realise the changes they are going to have to make.

The practice of infecting human subjects with disease under controlled circumstances to better understand how the body reacts to a new treatment is as old as medical science itself. The reason why it is not common in India is because of ethical and legal concerns. If we can find our way past that this could be a useful approach.

Large language models require training data sets in order to continuously improve. However, given the rate at which models are growing we are soon going to run out of training data. And synthetic data is not the solution we thought it might be.

The Digital Personal Data Protection Bill - that has been listed as one of the items for discussion in the Monsoon Session of Parliament - will, if enacted be a significant first step in the journey to a functional privacy regime. But there is still a lot to be done including issuing regulations and establishing the Data Protection Board.

Regulating the intersection of data protection and competition is hard. Dominant platforms can leverage user data to create monopolies, limit user choice and raise competition concerns. As India prepares its own data protection law, it should try and avoid regulatory overlaps and strike a balance between data protection and competition regulation.

We tend to think of technology as either “good” nor “bad” based on the outcomes it has. This is futile as in most instances any harms that may be caused by technology is on account of how it is used and by whom.

New Technologies require regulators to think innovatively about safety. To find a way to encourage experimentation and yet not do so at the cost of human safety. This is a difficult line to draw but draw it we must.

As artificial intelligence enters into the music industry, incumbents have already begun to resist the transformation it will inevitably bring. But change is inevitable and it is only those artists who are able to embrace it who will survive the transition.

Our instinctive reaction to new and revolutionary technology is often fear of consequences that we cannot predict. But if we can rein in our instincts and conquer our fears, maybe we can master of the technology.