Concerns that India’s political and corporate systems are unwilling to meaningfully protect personal data dominated a discussion on artificial intelligence at the India Today AI Summit 2026, with speakers warning that citizens are increasingly being left to fend for themselves as AI systems expand across the economy and the state.
Nikhil Pahwa, founder of MediaNama, said users should not expect meaningful intervention from institutions when it comes to safeguarding privacy.
“Frankly, I don’t think the lawmakers do. I don’t think the companies whose apps we use do, so it’s upon us,” he said, arguing that awareness is now the only realistic defence against unchecked data collection.
Pahwa warned that the appetite for data has grown alongside the spread of AI, with apps and platforms collecting more personal information to train models. Users, he said, often fail to realise that sharing access with AI tools does not just expose their own data but also the information of people they interact with. He added that once data is fed into an AI system, it cannot be reversed.
“Once the data is processed and a language model is trained, it’s impossible to undo it,” he said.
Weak laws, stronger systems
Apar Gupta, founder and director of the Internet Freedom Foundation, said India’s legal protections have not kept pace with the deployment of AI, particularly in government systems. He noted that artificial intelligence is already being used in welfare and policing, where failures can result in denial of services or loss of liberty.
India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act is not yet in effect, Gupta said, and even then excludes publicly available personal data from its scope. “So, according to me, the only protection to a large extent we have at present, from these AI systems which are getting better, the more information they pull in from the user as well, which may, again, be a part of the retraining of that data, is contract based,” he said.
Gupta argued that relying on technical safeguards without enforceable legal oversight is risky, especially when AI is deployed by the state. He said transparency around how such systems are built, trained and audited is essential, warning that technology with the power to “provide and deny” must be constrained by law rather than trust.
The speakers basically provided a look at India’s AI trajectory, which is rapid adoption paired with limited accountability. They suggested that as AI systems are becoming more deeply embedded in public services and consumer platforms, the burden of protecting privacy, speakers said, is moving away from lawmakers and companies and onto citizens themselves.
