India, Nov. 1 -- As the Supreme Court takes up the DPDP Act, the world's data protection laws show how democracies have tried to reconcile two rights that both matter

Last week I wrote about the constitutional tightrope of competing rights: how they are harmonised, and where their boundaries lie. This is another case in point. A journalist essentially works like an investigator, she checks a name against a land record, matches a director's identification number across two companies, reads a court filing, calls a neighbour, writes it all down.

Painstakingly uncovering linkages, actors, actions across documents, data and personal accounts of sources. In the vocabulary of modern data protection law, each of those acts is the "processing of...