India Today AI Summit 2026: 'Lawmakers do not care about our privacy, onus is on citizens'

Speakers at the India Today AI Summit 2026 warned that India's rapid adoption of AI is outpacing privacy protections, leaving individuals responsible for safeguarding their own data. With weak enforcement and delayed laws, lawmakers and companies are failing to keep up, panellists said.

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.

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.