From Regulation to Remedy: Bridging the Gap Between Dark Pattern  Enforcement and Contractual Consent Under Indian Law

Surya Haridas Menon; Utkarsh Vinay Shukla

From Regulation to Remedy: Bridging the Gap Between Dark Pattern Enforcement and Contractual Consent Under Indian Law

Author(s)	Mr. Surya Haridas Menon, Mr. Utkarsh Vinay Shukla
Country	India
Abstract	The Central Consumer Protection Authority’s 2023 Guidelines on Dark Patterns, and its subsequent orders against platforms such as BookMyShow, IndiGo, and McAfee, mark a significant regulatory response to manipulative digital design. Yet this response operates almost entirely on a public-enforcement track: it penalises the platform without disturbing the individual transaction. A consumer who is “basket-sneaked” into a charitable contribution or auto-renewed into a subscription through a banned dark pattern gains no corresponding right, under the Indian Contract Act, 1872, to treat their own contract as voidable — that determination still turns on the considerably harder, fact-specific tests of fraud, misrepresentation, or undue influence under Sections 15 to 19. This paper argues that this is not a minor procedural gap but a structural failure to connect regulatory findings to contractual consequence, leaving the individual consumer without a private remedy even where the state has already established that their consent was engineered. Through doctrinal analysis of Sections 14, 16, and 19 of the Contract Act alongside the CCPA’s existing dark-pattern taxonomy, the paper examines whether “undue influence” can be judicially extended to interface-level manipulation, and draws on comparative approaches under the EU’s Unfair Commercial Practices Directive and California’s consumer-protection framework to test what a bridging mechanism might look like. It concludes by proposing a rebuttable presumption — triggered by a CCPA-classified dark pattern — against the validity of consent obtained through it, restoring the individual consumer’s contractual remedy alongside the regulator’s public one.
Published In	Volume 8, Issue 5, September-October 2026
Published On	2026-10-17

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From Regulation to Remedy: Bridging the Gap Between Dark Pattern Enforcement and Contractual Consent Under Indian Law

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