NodGuard introduces consent infrastructure for DPDP compliance

Most enterprises understand the Digital Personal Data Protection Act. Legal teams have reviewed the rules. Privacy policies have been updated. Cookie banners have been deployed. But the majority of them do not connect to the systems that actually process personal data: the CRMs that send emails, the CDPs that sync audiences, the ad platforms that receive conversion events, the WhatsApp BSPs that fire promotional messages.

Consent is captured in one place. Marketing executes in another. When a user withdraws consent at 3 PM, the evening email campaign may have already been queued. When the Data Protection Board asks for evidence, the proof lives across five different dashboards, none of which were designed to generate audit trails.

This is the problem NodGuard is trying to solve.

Launched by Compass, a marketing infrastructure company, NodGuard is a consent infrastructure product that sits between consent capture and marketing execution. It enforces consent state across every outbound channel: email, SMS, WhatsApp, CRM, CDP, and Conversion APIs.

"Cookie banners do not equal compliance," says Gayathri Maalige, Co-founder of Compass. "Compliance means that when a user says no, every system in your stack respects that decision before the next message goes out. That is an infrastructure problem, not a legal one."

What makes it different?

NodGuard operates on what the company calls the CORE framework: Consent capture in 23 Indian languages, Orchestration across every channel, Resolution through consent-verified attribution, and Evidence via tamper-proof audit logs.

The product deploys in 30 minutes, wrapping around existing marketing stacks without replacing them. The architecture is designed for fail-safe operation: if any component fails, the default behavior is to block data processing, not to allow it.

For CMOs, NodGuard provides attribution that runs exclusively on consent-verified data. For CTOs, it provides an enforcement layer that requires no changes to existing infrastructure. For DPOs, it provides a complete audit trail exportable in one click.

The clock is ticking

DPDP enforcement begins in November 2026. Penalties reach ₹250 crore. But beyond penalties, the real cost is data quality. Enterprises that build consent infrastructure now will have cleaner first-party data, more accurate attribution, and competitive positions.

"The brands that treat consent as infrastructure will have the deepest first-party data moats in India within two years," says Adittya Joshi, Co-founder of Compass. "The ones that treat it as a checkbox will spend the next two years explaining gaps to regulators."

Compass as a company:

Compass is a marketing infrastructure company building products for Indian enterprises at the intersection of marketing performance and data compliance. Founded in Bengaluru, the company builds infrastructure that helps brands market effectively, measure accurately, and stay compliant under India's evolving regulatory environment. NodGuard, its first product, is a consent infrastructure for the DPDP era.

NodGuard is a product of Compass is now available at nodguard.in

Note to the Reader: This article is part of Mint's promotional consumer connect initiative and is independently created by the brand. Mint assumes no editorial responsibility for the content.