New Delhi: The National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) has summoned Google for a meeting, taking note of ThePrint’s report that highlighted how AI image and video generation apps hosted on Play Store are able to create non-consensual intimate visuals from anyone’s photo. NCPCR Member-Secretary Sanjeev Sharma said Wednesday the agency has also decided to issue by December guidelines for social media, gaming and AI platforms.
ThePrint has learnt that the guidelines will require platforms to put in place age assurance-based controls on social media and to add reporting options for short-video formats such as Reels. They will also set stricter norms across all platforms, including for AI-generated content.
Sources said the guidelines will be dynamic, and the Ministry of Women and Child Development (WCD) and other bodies will be able to add to them.
It has also been learnt that the NCPCR has summoned Google for a meeting later this month on ThePrint’s report on AI image and video generation apps on the Play Store.
“We have already had consultation with them. Now we are coming up with the guidelines very soon,” Sharma said at a panel on youth wellbeing at the Trust and Safety India Festival (TASI) 2026.
ThePrint’s 25 August report found dozens of “AI kiss and hug” apps on Google Play in India, several with over a million downloads. The apps generate intimate videos from photographs of real people without checking consent. Some carried store ratings clearing them for children as young as three, and the videos carried no AI label.
It is unsettled whether Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Amendment Rules, 2026, notified on 10 February, apply on standalone generator apps. The amended rules seek to regulate synthetically generated information, including realistic AI-generated images, audio and video.
‘Not regulating social media’
Sharma said the commission chose guidelines over legislation for speed. “If you ask me to change legislation, it will take time. You have to go to the Parliament, and it’s a long process,” he said. “Once the guidelines are issued, we’ll keep on having the dynamic consultation… we’ll keep on modifying our guidelines.”
“Regulation does not mean that we are regulating social media,” he said. “We
firmly believe that it needs to be co-regulated. Co-regulation is the key.”
Sharma said the NCPCR is building an AI-based tool to proactively detect child sexual abuse material (CSAM) online and remove it. He said the tool will be shared with state police departments “so that they can take action against the perpetrator.” CSAM, he said, “has actually assumed a very big proportion in India.”
During a review meeting at the commission Monday, Women and Child Development (WCD) Minister Annapurna Devi directed the NCPCR to fast-track both the tool and the social media guidelines. The tool is being built with the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology.
In 2024, the NCPCR met Google, YouTube, X, Snapchat, ShareChat, Reddit and Bumble, among others, and asked them to build mechanisms to obtain parental consent for processing data of minors, and sought action-taken reports.
Under the Digital Personal Data Protection Rules, platforms must obtain verifiable parental consent before processing data of anyone under 18 from May 2027.
‘Progressive autonomy’
Speaking at the event, Uthara Ganesh, the Head of Public Policy for Asia-Pacific at Snap Inc (Snapchat) said she wanted the NCPCR guidelines and product design to reflect “progressive autonomy”. She said they should preserve “privacy, protection, participation” and give young people more control “as they gain a majority”.
Laura Higgins, Senior Director of Community Safety and Civility at Roblox, said the company has open-sourced Sentinel, its tool to detect grooming, to other platforms. Flagged cases are reported to the US-based National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC). Roblox said last year that Sentinel had led to 1,200 such reports in the first half of 2025.
Higgins told the event Roblox runs a teen council and a parent council, and has built a co-play experience in which “the kids actually lead their parents through Roblox”, teaching them settings and parental controls. Modules built with partners cover grooming, bullying and mental health, and the company plans to add AI content.
‘Trust at an all-time low’
Lucy Thomas, the co-founder and CEO of Australian youth organisation Project Rockit, said young people’s trust in adults is at an all-time low “because we’ve created these technologies without including them”.
“We tend to assume that being young is the same as being incapable. And I can tell you, it is not,” she said at the event. “Our job isn’t just to protect young people from the future, it’s to build it with them.”
She said a system that “seems like it understands you isn’t the same as a system that understands you.” In Australia, she said, there is a six-month wait for mental health support, “so of course young people are grabbing this device and turning to agents for that support.”
Thomas compared the generation in charge to a Munchausen syndrome by proxy carer, who causes an illness in order to rescue the person from it. “I don’t think we’re the right people to be fixing the problems that we created,” she said. A 16-year-old member of the organisation’s youth collective leads its AI transformation, she said.
Mahima Kaul, Director, Global Affairs, Netflix India, said AI will lower the cost of production for genres such as mythology, which “was too expensive” to make. Parents, she said, “are expecting that disruption… and they want safer spaces for their kids.”
TASI is hosted by the Centre for Social Research and the Trust & Safety Forum at the India International Centre.
(Edited by Ajeet Tiwari)