Beyond Notice and Consent

A Jurisprudential Evaluation of the Europe’s GDPR and India’s DPDP Act in an AI-DRIVEN Ecosystem

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6239-795-8_19How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Privacy; Digital Autonomy; Data Governance; Philosophies of Privacy

Abstract

Human life has become increasingly influenced by algorithms, automated decision-making systems, and extensive data analytics, creating a digital environment in which individuals are continuously monitored, profiled, and evaluated. Although legislatures worldwide have responded to this pervasive surveillance infrastructure by introducing privacy and data governance frameworks grounded in ethical principles such as transparency, accountability, and fairness. However, their approaches remain largely based on Alan Westin’s Notice-and-Consent model, which is only reactive and is insufficient to address the deeper challenges posed by AI-based technology, especially to digital autonomy, which is threatened due to the continuous storage, processing, and utilization of individual data without meaningful consent. Therefore, this paper argues that the contemporary data governance regimes must move beyond mere procedural compliance and be ‘re-constructed’ on the philosophical and normative foundations of privacy. Adopting a Doctrinal, comparative, and Normative methodology, the paper compares Europe’s GDPR, which was adopted in 2016, with India’s DPDP Act adopted in 2023. The focus on these laws is based on the time gap between their adoption, during which AI-based technology became more deeply integrated into society. This allows the paper to examine whether the laws reflect this technological shift and incorporate more advanced or evolved understandings of privacy. Drawing on the works of Warren and Brandeis, Alan Westin, Judith Jarvis Thompson, and Helen Nissenbaum, along with the critical philosophers of privacy, the paper assesses the evolution of understanding of individual privacy to its contextual and relational understandings. The paper further uses Kantian and Rawlsian perspectives of justice and fairness to evaluate GDPR & DPDP. In doing so, the paper argues for a value-centric model of digital governance that embeds autonomy and human dignity into the design of the regulatory framework thereby enabling an anticipatory and grounded approach to privacy regulation worldwide.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

Download article (PDF)

TY  - CONF
AU  - Vanshika Jain
AU  - A. P. Bhanu
AU  - Aayushi Goel
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/10/08
TI  - Beyond Notice and Consent
BT  - Proceedings of the International Conference on Advancing Economics (ICAE): Redefining Growth: Integrating Economy Society and Sustainability for a Resilient Future (ICAE 2026)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 315
EP  - 338
SN  - 2352-5428
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6239-795-8_19
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6239-795-8_19
ID  - Jain2026
ER  -