DIGITAL JUSTICE AND PERSONAL DATA POLICY: PRIVACY, PLATFORM POWER AND INSTITUTIONAL INDEPENDENCE

Abstract

Indonesia enacted a comprehensive personal data protection statute in 2022, but its transitional period expired without the establishment of the supervisory authority on which the entire enforcement architecture depends, leaving substantive rights without an institution capable of vindicating them. This study aims to assess the design of Indonesian data protection policy as a problem of justice rather than of compliance, to examine the contribution of Islamic legal doctrine on concealment and the prohibition of spying to the normative foundation of privacy, and to formulate criteria for effective institutional design. The research applies normative juridical research with statutory, conceptual, case and comparative approaches, supported by a maqāṣid reading of the protection of honour, drawing on Indonesian legislation, the European and Brazilian frameworks, and the scholarship on informational privacy. The findings show three structural deficits: an enforcement vacuum created by the absence of an independent authority, an asymmetry of consent in which agreement is technically obtained but practically unavoidable, and a public sector exemption pattern that leaves the largest data controller least constrained. Islamic legal doctrine supplies an obligation-centred framework in which the holder of information owes a duty of concealment irrespective of consent. The study recommends an independent authority with budgetary autonomy, statutory limits on consent as a legal basis, and equal application to public bodies.