Designing Products in a DPDP World: India’s Privacy Law as a Product Constraint

The short

From “collect everything” to “collect with a reason”

For the past decade, the default growth mindset was simple: track as much as possible, store it forever, work out the monetisation later. The DPDP Act flips that script.

The law is built around concepts like purpose limitation, data minimisation, storage limitation, and user rights. In plain language:

• You should only collect what you actually need for a specific purpose.
• You should be able to state that purpose clearly up front.
• You should not keep the data longer than necessary just because storage is cheap.
• You should be able to delete or de-identify data once that purpose is over, subject to legal obligations.

That sounds abstract until you look at your own product:

• Do you really need full date of birth, or will month and year do?
• Do you have a business reason for storing every clickstream event and combining it with phone numbers?
• Can you justify third-party tracking scripts on your landing pages beyond “we might run retargeting later”?

Under DPDP, those are no longer questions just for lawyers. They are design decisions for product managers and engineering leads.

Consent screens become UX, not boilerplate

The Act’s idea of consent is not the old “scroll past a wall of text and tap accept.” It pushes toward consent that is:

• Specific — tied to a clear purpose, not bundled with everything else.
• Informed — the user actually understands what is being collected and why.
• Unambiguous — expressed through a clear affirmative action.
• Revocable — easy to withdraw later, without penalties unrelated to the core service.

That forces a different kind of UX work:

• Breaking one opaque “Agree to all” into smaller choices (product-critical vs marketing vs research).
• Using plain language (“We use this so that…”) instead of legal phrasing.
• Designing prominent “Manage data” or “Privacy” entry points in your app, not hiding them under five taps.

If your product needs to trick users into tapping “Allow”, it is not just a legal risk — it is a design failure.

For Indian apps with global ambitions, DPDP-compliant consent flows are also a strategic asset. They align more closely with the expectations of partners working under GDPR-style regimes.

Data retention and deletion as product features

Storage limitation is where many products quietly fall out of compliance. Logs, backups, test databases — they all accumulate personal data that nobody actively manages.

In a DPDP world, you need to answer three simple questions:

• How long will we keep this category of data if the user is active?
• What happens when they become inactive or close their account?
• Where exactly do we delete or de-identify it (primary DB, analytics, backups, third-party tools)?

That leads naturally to product work:

• A clear, tested “Delete account” flow that actually triggers deletion jobs — not just marks a flag.
• Tools for customer support to execute access, correction and erasure requests reliably.
• Internal dashboards for privacy and engineering to see what is scheduled for deletion and what failed.

The teams that treat this as infrastructure will be the ones that can look regulators and enterprise customers in the eye when they ask, “Show us how you delete.”

Segmentation, ads and third-party tools after DPDP

Analytics, marketing automation, crash reporting, chat widgets, A/B testing tools — each new SDK is another potential data processor under the Act.

For product and growth teams, that means:

• Mapping data flows — who sends what to whom, for what purpose, and under which contract.
• Aligning consents — if a user opted out of marketing, are you sure their data is not still flowing to ad platforms via other tags?
• Reconsidering “free” tools that monetise by harvesting behavioural data.

The new default should be: “Can we do this in-house with aggregated or anonymised data before we ship raw events to a third party?”

Many teams will find they can hit their business goals with less granularity than they assumed, especially once they build decent in-house reporting on top of consented data.

What Indian product teams should do now

A practical way to respond is to treat DPDP as a product problem with legal constraints, not a legal problem with product side-effects.

• Audit one journey end-to-end — sign-up to first transaction — and mark every place personal data is captured, stored or shared.
• Rewrite notices in plain language. If you cannot explain the purpose in a short sentence, that’s a red flag.
• Pick three high-impact fixes — for example, a real “Delete account” flow, a simplified consent screen, and a cleaned-up tracking tag configuration.
• Bake privacy into your PRD template — add a small section: “What personal data will this feature use? Under which consent? How long will we keep it?”

The goal is not perfection on day one. It is to change the habit: every new feature ships with a privacy story, not just a happy-path story.

Rule — for every new data field

One-sentence test.
Before adding any new field, tracker or SDK, ask:

“If a regulator or customer asked why we collect this, could we answer in one honest sentence without using the words ‘just in case’?”

If the answer is no, you probably should not collect it.

Disclaimer

This bataSutra article is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute legal, compliance, tax or business advice. Organisations should not use this piece as the sole basis for any decision relating to the Digital Personal Data Protection Act or other regulations, and should consult qualified legal and privacy professionals for guidance tailored to their specific context.