AI and the Right to Privacy: A Comparative Study of India and the European Union

Artificial intelligence has turned privacy from a question of disclosure alone into one of continuous data collection, inference, prediction and consequential decision-making. This Article asks whether Indian law offers protection against such forms of data-intensive power that is as layered as that of the European Union. It adopts a doctrinal and comparative approach, analysing constitutional rights, data protection laws, artificial intelligence legislation, key case law, institutional documents and enforcement data. India has a solid constitutional framework for dignity, autonomy and proportionality, but its statutory framework is less specific on solely automated decisions, explanations, meaningful human intervention, biometric surveillance and model training. This gap is widened by the phased commencement of the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, under which a number of substantive obligations had yet to come into force as of September 2026. The European Union, by comparison, combines the Charter of Fundamental Rights, the General Data Protection Regulation and the Artificial Intelligence Act, producing more detailed rules on lawful processing, sensitive data, automated decisions, risk management and transparency. The European model is nonetheless fragmented and highly technical, especially on model training, data inferred by models, and the blurred boundary between data protection law and the new artificial intelligence law. The comparison points to a calibrated Indian reform agenda built on contestability, high-risk impact assessment, biometric safeguards, training-data accountability and independent technical oversight, rather than wholesale transplantation of the European Union regime.