DPDP Act consent requirements

What valid consent looks like under the DPDP Act

Section 6 of the DPDP Act is unusually specific about consent. It must be free, specific, informed, unconditional and unambiguous, given by a clear affirmative action, and limited strictly to the personal data necessary for the stated purpose. Bundled consent — one checkbox covering analytics, advertising, marketing email and profiling — does not satisfy this test.

The Act also requires that withdrawal be as easy as giving consent. In practice that means if a visitor could accept tracking with one click on a banner, they must be able to withdraw it with roughly one click too, at any time, from any page. A buried link in a privacy policy is not equivalent.

• No pre-ticked boxes and no implied consent from continued browsing
• Separate opt-in per purpose: analytics, marketing, functional, advertising
• A notice, in plain language, available in English and the Eighth Schedule languages
• A standing, always-reachable way to withdraw consent
• A record of what was consented to, when, and against which notice version

The notice that has to accompany consent

Section 5 requires a notice, given with or before the request for consent, that describes the personal data to be collected and the purpose of processing, explains how to exercise Data Principal rights, and explains how to complain to the Board. It must be available in English and in the languages of the Eighth Schedule.

AssentRepo generates and hosts this notice per site, versions it, and records the version identifier against every consent event — which is what makes the log defensible later.

Withdrawal must be as easy as consent

This is the requirement most implementations fail. If accepting took one tap on a banner, withdrawing cannot take an email to support. A persistent, always-visible privacy control is the only reliable way to satisfy it, which is why the AssentRepo banner leaves a small launcher on the page after the banner is dismissed.

On withdrawal you must cease processing within a reasonable time, and so must your processors — the obligation flows downstream to every vendor you passed the data to.

Data Principal rights and the request queue

Chapter III of the Act gives every Data Principal the right to access a summary of their personal data and the processing performed, the right to correction and completion, the right to erasure, and the right to nominate someone to exercise those rights on their behalf. You must publish a way to make those requests and you must respond within a reasonable period.

For a small team, the failure mode is not refusing a request — it is losing one. Requests arrive by email, WhatsApp, a contact form and Instagram DM, and nobody owns the spreadsheet. A single intake endpoint with an auditable status trail removes that risk entirely, which is why the AssentRepo banner ships a built-in DSAR form alongside the cookie controls.

You have to be able to prove it

The obligation that catches most teams out is evidentiary. Under Section 8, the Data Fiduciary — you — is responsible for demonstrating compliance, including that valid consent was obtained. If the Board asks and your answer is "our banner was live", that is not evidence.

A defensible consent record contains, at minimum: a stable visitor identifier, the categories accepted and rejected, a UTC timestamp, the version of the notice shown, the policy text hash, and enough network context to establish the request was genuine without storing raw personal identifiers. AssentRepo writes exactly this record for every consent event and one-way hashes the IP address with a server-side salt, so the log is useful to an auditor and useless to an attacker.

Frequently asked questions