India: Issued advisory concerning Due Diligence by Intermediaries under the Information Technology Act and Rules including design requirements

On 1 March 2024, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology of India announced measures for the regulation of synthetic creation, generation or modification of text, audio, visual or audio-visual information that may be used potentially as misinformation or deepfake. The measures require such information to be labelled or embedded with a permanent unique metadata or identifier that can be used to identify the origin of the information and the intermediary through whose software or computer resource such information has been created, generated or modified. The measures also call for a “consent popup” mechanism to inform users about the potential fallibility or unreliability of the output generated. All concerned intermediaries are required to comply immediately and report to the Ministry within 15 days of this advisory.