Glossary
DPDP Act for Employee / HR Data
Also known as: DPDP Act 2023, data privacy
The Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 (DPDP Act) is India's data-protection law governing how organisations collect, use, and store personal data, including employee and HR data. It requires a lawful purpose, appropriate notice and consent where applicable, and safeguards against misuse. Attendance systems fall squarely within its scope because they process personal information.
Employers act as data fiduciaries over their employees' personal data, which includes attendance logs, location where captured, and any biometric identifiers. The DPDP Act expects such data to be collected for clear, limited purposes and protected with reasonable security safeguards.
This has direct consequences for how you track attendance. Excessive surveillance, such as screenshots, keystroke logging, or constant location tracking, is hard to justify against the principle of collecting only what is necessary, and it raises both legal and trust risks.
The privacy-respecting approach is to capture the minimum data needed to prove presence and compute pay, be transparent about what is collected, and store it securely. Systems designed around necessity and consent are far easier to defend under the DPDP framework than surveillance-heavy tools.
India context
Under the DPDP Act, 2023 employers should limit collection to what is necessary, be transparent with employees, secure the data, and honour data-principal rights, with sensitive identifiers like biometrics warranting extra care. Enforcement details continue to be shaped by rules under the Act.
How Workclave handles this
Workclave is built privacy-first: no screenshots, no keyloggers, and no central biometric surveillance, capturing only the session data needed to prove presence and compute pay. This data-minimising design aligns with DPDP expectations for employee data. compliance and privacy for attendance.
Related terms
Biometric attendance uses a physical identifier such as a fingerprint or facial scan to confirm that a specific person was present when they marked attendance. It reduces buddy punching, where one employee marks another as present. The verified event is then recorded as the attendance entry.
Read definition →The Labour Codes of 2019 to 2020 consolidate India's many older labour laws into four codes covering wages, industrial relations, social security, and occupational safety and working conditions. For attendance, they matter because they shape working-hour limits, overtime, weekly rest, and record-keeping. Employers are expected to keep reliable, inspectable attendance and wage records.
Read definition →Field or remote attendance is the recording of presence for employees who work away from a fixed office, such as remote developers, consultants at client sites, or field staff. It replaces the office door or biometric reader with a software-based way to log a verified work session. The goal is trustworthy presence data without a physical device.
Read definition →Session-based tracking records attendance as discrete work sessions, each with a start, an end, and a project, rather than a single daily clock-in and clock-out. A day can contain several sessions across different projects, breaks, or locations. This produces a far richer and more accurate picture of how time was actually spent.
Read definition →