The recent tragedy in Ghaziabad, where three young sisters allegedly jumped to their deaths after an intense obsession with a task-based “Korean” game and online content, has shocked the country. It has also forced us to confront an uncomfortable truth: today’s digital ecosystem is not built for children. It is built for engagement, data extraction and profit. Children, unfortunately, are collateral damage.
We can no longer pretend that depression, addiction, body-image distress, fear of missing out (FOMO), anxiety, cyberbullying, grooming and even suicidal ideation are rare side-effects of technology. They are being reported in ordinary homes, in every socio-economic class. Gaming apps, social-media platforms and content channels are not neutral utilities; they are products deliberately engineered to capture attention and shape behaviour. When these apps and platforms exploit the vulnerabilities of a developing brain, the law cannot look away.
How digital products are breeding harm
For a teenager, opening a social-media app often means entering a hall of mirrors. Curated images, beauty filters and “perfect” bodies create a permanent comparison trap. The message is simple and brutal: you are never attractive enough, successful enough or happy enough. It is no surprise that intensive social-media use has been linked with low self-esteem, body-image issues and disordered eating, especially among young users. The same platforms gamify social validation. Likes, streaks, follower counts and “seen” receipts are not cosmetic; they are behavioural levers. They train young users to chase micro-bursts of approval and dread social exclusion. FOMO is not an accident, it is a feature. You are always one notification away from feeling left out.
Harms do not stop at psychology. Cyberbullying and pile-ons follow children into their bedrooms. There is no “gate” to leave it behind. Victims are targeted through group chats, comment threads and “roast” pages and the link between cyberbullying, depression and self-harm among adolescents is becoming increasingly clear, at times not visible.
Gaming environments introduce another risk: grooming and sexual exploitation. Children interact with strangers behind avatars and gamertags. Voice chat and in-game messaging allow adults to pose as peers, slowly building trust, nudging conversations into private channels and asking for photos or meetings. What looks like “just a game” to a parent can be a vector for abuse.
Add to this the addictive architecture of modern games, including compulsion loops, variable rewards, loot boxes and time-limited events and you have a perfect storm. Many games are built around dopamine loops that keep players coming back for “just one more round”. For a developing brain, this can slide from high engagement into disordered use remarkably quickly.
This is no longer just a parenting problem
It is tempting to respond to such tragedies with moral panic: blame “bad parenting” or romanticise a pre-digital childhood. That response is both unfair and ineffective. Parents are often fighting a losing battle against products they did not design and cannot fully understand. They are up against sophisticated algorithms, persuasive design and intense social pressures among peers. Telling parents to “just monitor your child’s phone” without changing the system is akin to telling them to stand on a beach and hold back a rising tide.
When harms flow directly from how products are designed and monetised, we are no longer in the realm of private morality. We are in the realm of legal duty. There must be a duty of care on companies that build and profit from these systems and a responsibility on the State to enforce that duty through law and regulation.
What the DPDP Act already says about children
India’s Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act, 2023 and Rules,2025 (effective from May 2027), quietly introduced a powerful principle for children’s data. It requires verifiable parental consent for processing the personal data of anyone under 18. More importantly, it states that a data fiduciary “shall not undertake such processing of personal data that is likely to cause any detrimental effect on the well-being of a child”.
In plain language: if a company’s use of a child’s data is likely to harm that child’s well-being, it must not be done at all, even if some consent screen has been clicked. This prohibition covers manipulative profiling, behavioural targeting, highly personalised feeds that push self-harm or hyper-sexualised content and engagement-driven design that exploits children’s vulnerabilities.
The challenge is that “detrimental effect” is not yet defined in detail. Enforcement will depend on how the upcoming rules, the Data Protection Board and the courts interpret this clause. The Ghaziabad case and similar incidents involving online gaming and harmful content should push regulators to spell out clearly that addictive design, harmful recommendation systems and grooming-enabling features are squarely within the zone of “detrimental” processing for children.
What is the world doing?
Around the world, governments are experimenting with different responses. China has imposed strict limits on gaming time for minors, capping online play and requiring real-name registration. South Korea once had a midnight gaming curfew for under-16s, which it eventually replaced with a system where parents and children can choose permitted hours. The European Union’s Digital Services Act focuses on duty of care and age-appropriate design, rather than a single fixed social-media age.
Australia has gone further with an under-16 social-media ban (for certain categories), requiring platforms to prevent under-16s from opening accounts and to remove existing under-age users. This is an important signal, but early commentary from there already flags serious implementation challenges: age-verification can be inaccurate or intrusive; teenagers find workarounds; and some may be pushed to more dangerous, less regulated platforms. It is too early to declare the experiment a success.
The lesson for India is clear. If an absolute ban is genuinely the only way to save our children, our babies, our Gen Next, the very future of this country, then we should have the courage to say so and to do it, however tough it sounds. Nothing is more important than a child’s life and mental health; if no other measure can realistically address the harm, then we must be prepared to ban the most dangerous products and practices outright.
If we decide that a complete ban is not the path, then delay is no longer an option. We need urgent, multi-pronged action. First, every device in a child’s hand must run in a locked, tamper-resistant child-safe mode by default, with age-layered filters so that a 10-year-old’s phone behaves like it is serving a 10-year-old and a 16-year-old’s like it is serving a 16-year-old, by design and not by accident. Second, platforms and gaming apps must be legally required to adopt age-appropriate design, meaningful age-assurance and a clear ban on profiling, targeted advertising, grooming-friendly features and addictive engagement loops for minors. Third, regulators must start using the DPDP Act’s “detrimental effect” test to strike down any data use or product design that is likely to harm a child’s mental health or well-being. And finally, the primary legal duty, enforced through strict penalties, must rest on device makers and platforms, with the law stepping in against adults only in egregious cases where protections are deliberately stripped away. If we are not prepared to ban, then we must at least be prepared to do this and do it now.
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Khushbu Jain is a practicing advocate in the Supreme Court of India and founding partner of Ark Legal, specializing in privacy law and data protection.
