DIGITAL EVIDENCE AND PRIVACY: A LEGAL DILEMMA

Modern life leaves a digital trail. Messages, location histories, cloud backups, browsing records and biometric logs together form a detailed portrait of a person, and investigators and litigants increasingly rely on this material to prove facts in court. Digital evidence has therefore become indispensable to adjudication. Yet the same data that proves a fact also exposes the intimate life of the person who generated it. This is the dilemma at the centre of this article: the State’s legitimate interest in accurate fact-finding pulls against the individual’s claim to informational privacy. In India the tension has sharpened in recent years. The Supreme Court recognised privacy as a fundamental right in 2017. Parliament replaced the Indian Evidence Act, 1872 with the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, 2023 (“BSA”), substituted the Code of Criminal Procedure with the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023 (“BNSS”), and enacted the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 (“DPDP Act”). These instruments were drafted with different priorities and do not speak to each other cleanly. This article examines how they interact, argues that the law of admissibility remains tilted towards reliability rather than rights, and suggests reforms that could reconcile the two interests.