Data Privacy Day 2026: Why privacy will shape enterprise value

Data Privacy Day, observed annually on 28 January, highlights the importance of protecting personal information in our increasingly digital world. It reminds individuals and organisations that privacy is more than a compliance requirement. The day encourages awareness, education, and proactive practices to prevent breaches and misuse.

As India’s digital economy matures and the DPDP Act reshapes accountability, privacy is rapidly emerging as a measure of governance, not merely compliance.

There was a time when privacy failures were treated as unfortunate technology mishaps, an outage, a leak, a statement, a fix, and then business moved on. That era is ending. By 2026, privacy will no longer be a post-incident discussion led solely by legal or IT teams. It is set to become a boardroom priority, directly influencing enterprise valuation, investor confidence, and long-term competitiveness.

This shift is unfolding quietly but decisively across Indian enterprises. As digital platforms scale, AI systems accelerate decision-making, and data flows multiply across vendors and geographies, the cost of exposure extends beyond regulatory penalties. It manifests in prolonged operational disruptions, erosion of brand trust, delayed transactions, and heightened scrutiny from investors and partners, who increasingly view privacy maturity as a proxy for management quality.

The limits of breach response

Despite rising awareness, Indian enterprises remain largely reactive, investing in breach response and compliance after the fact, an approach misaligned with a data-driven economy where trust erodes instantly.

Vijender Yadav, CEO and Co-founder of Accops, describes this as a governance gap rather than a technology flaw. “The widening gap between what Indian enterprises spend after a breach versus the cost of prevention is becoming a primary risk to valuations and IPO readiness. In 2026, a privacy failure is viewed with the same scrutiny as a financial misstatement,” he says. According to Yadav, traditional security models that equate verified identity with trust are obsolete in an era shaped by synthetic media, hybrid work, and deep third-party dependencies. He sees the shift toward continuous adaptive risk and trust assessment as essential for enterprises that want to protect long-term value.

Boards are beginning to recognise that privacy failures are no longer isolated incidents. Malcolm Gomes, Chief Operating Officer at IDfy, observes that many organisations still underestimate the true cost of breaches. “Most organisations account for incident response, forensics, and immediate legal costs, but underestimate longer term impacts such as operational disruption, customer churn, regulatory engagement, delayed transactions, and sustained management distraction,” he says.

In capital markets and regulated sectors, the more significant damage is often to market confidence. Gomes notes that prevention spending appears modest compared with the investor scrutiny and valuation impact following a public disclosure.

Trust as a competitive advantage

For consumer-facing platforms, privacy is no longer just about avoiding harm. It is becoming a differentiator that shapes user behaviour and loyalty. Saket Jha Saurabh, Director and Head of AR and Content Partnerships at Snap Inc., highlights how blurred digital and physical lives have raised the stakes. “Today, where digital self-expression is constant and ubiquitous, the boundary between our online and offline worlds has blurred, making thoughtful privacy more essential than ever,” he says. Snap’s safety-by-design approach, built around default privacy settings and ephemeral communication, is aimed at reducing pressure and protecting personal boundaries, particularly for India’s rapidly expanding creator economy.

This emphasis on trust is not limited to social platforms. In sectors such as recommerce, privacy risks are embedded in physical devices themselves. Raghavendra Singh, CTO at Cashify, explains that devices often carry years of personal, financial, and biometric data. “Many users still underestimate how much data remains on their devices and are often unaware of the secure erasure methods available,” he says. While regulatory frameworks like the DPDP Act establish accountability, Singh argues that privacy outcomes ultimately depend on system design. At Cashify, data safety is treated as a default responsibility through factory-grade erasure processes rather than a user-led decision.

In digital payments, privacy has become inseparable from trust and adoption. Prakash Ravindran, CEO and Director at InstiFi, says data protection is now a foundational pillar of the ecosystem. “With increasing reliance on online transactions, the responsibility to protect sensitive financial and business data has never been greater,” he notes. For fintech platforms, privacy-by-design and compliance-driven frameworks are essential not only for risk management but for enabling confident participation by merchants and users.

Integrity, not just protection

As automation and scale reshape the digital economy, privacy discussions are expanding beyond protection to include data integrity. Amit Relan, CEO and co-founder of mFilterIt, argues that credibility is now at stake. “Privacy is no longer just about compliance. It is about credibility,” he says. According to Relan, frameworks succeed only when the data entering systems is genuine, consented to, and free from manipulation. In environments shaped by bots and synthetic activity, protecting user data without ensuring its integrity creates blind spots that undermine trust.

This broader view aligns with how investors are reframing privacy risk. Gomes observes that privacy failures are increasingly seen as indicators of corporate governance quality, similar to weaknesses in internal controls or disclosures. For boards, this reframing elevates privacy from a technical concern to a determinant of valuation, exit readiness, and public market credibility.

From compliance burden to governance signal

With the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, India has shifted privacy from a compliance obligation to a marker of governance, placing accountability squarely on organisations.

Rubal Sahni, AVP India and Emerging Markets at Confluent, frames this transition through the lens of individual control. “I believe in one principle, ‘Your Data, Your Rules.’ We live in an age where apps know more about us than our closest ones. But do we really know how our data is collected, shared, or used and with whom. Bharat's DPDP Act is a welcome reset. It puts the power back into the hands of the individual and rightly so,” he says.

As AI adoption accelerates, Sahni warns that the greater risk lies in systems acting without consent rather than technology replacing jobs. For Indian enterprises, privacy now sits at the intersection of innovation and responsibility.

The boardroom question

As regulatory expectations tighten and privacy-literate consumers demand greater transparency, Indian enterprises face a defining question: can they demonstrate that breaches are unlikely, rather than merely survivable? The companies that succeed will be those that embed privacy into their architecture, decision-making, and oversight, treating it as an offensive capability that signals operational excellence and long-term trustworthiness.

The DPDP Act has accelerated this reckoning, but the forces driving it are market-led. Capital, customers, and partners are already rewarding organisations that demonstrate disciplined data governance. By 2026, privacy will no longer be measured by how quickly a company responds to failures; it will be judged by how convincingly its board can show that failures were designed out of the system from the outset.