Data Privacy and Civic Platforms: What Users Should Demand

Civic platforms collect some of the most sensitive personal data: your phone number, your location, the nature of your feedback, your relationship to local politics. The Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act 2023 establishes minimum standards that every civic platform must meet.

What the DPDP Act 2023 Requires

The DPDP Act 2023 requires: (1) informed consent before collecting personal data; (2) purpose limitation — data collected for feedback submission cannot be used for advertising; (3) data minimisation — only collect what is necessary; (4) the right to erasure — you can request deletion of your personal data; and (5) the right to know what data is held about you.

What Seedhi Baat Collects and Why

Seedhi Baat collects: your name (for personalisation), phone number (for account recovery), email (optional, for the weekly newsletter), state and constituency (for routing and leaderboard). It does not collect Aadhaar numbers, financial information, or location beyond constituency level. Feedback text is stored and publicly attributed to the constituency, not to your name.

Public Accountability vs Personal Privacy

Seedhi Baat resolves the tension between accountability and privacy by making constituency-level data public while keeping individual user data private. Your feedback is logged against your MP's constituency record — not against your personal name on a public page.

Join Seedhi Baat — built with privacy as a design constraint, not an afterthought.

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