Is Encrypted Data Personal Data under India’s DPDP Act? - Identifiability, Liability, and Regulatory Design in a Growing Digital Economy

This piece argues that encryption reduces risk but does not remove legal liability under India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, since encrypted data is still considered personal data if individuals remain identifiable. The Digital Personal Data Protection Rules, 2025 treat encryption as a security safeguard, not anonymization, aligning it with pseudonymization rather than full de-identification. The key challenge is designing rules that assess identifiability contextually across data-sharing chains without overburdening organizations or confusing data classification with liability.

Sanjali Rupnawar, Mustafa Rajkotwala

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