With the operationalisation of the Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023 (hereinafter “DPDPA”), the digital economy of India is going to witness a drastic revamp. This revamp will pertinently change the perception of digital business as well as e-commerce operators (“operators”) as to how they collect and process data of their customers without intruding on their privacy. DPDPA will now transform e-commerce operators as to how they design their user interfaces (“UI-UX”), collect and process data on their platforms, and record informed and free consent from customers, thereby designing legally compliant consent banners on their websites and mobile applications. Initially, where operators used to collect bundled consent and process customer data in bulk during the SPDI (Sensitive Personal Data or Information) Rules 2011 (“SPDI Rules”) regime, in the DPDPA regime, they now have to capture informed and purpose-specific consent every time they collect the data from the customer for a particular purpose. As per the recent survey conducted by the Advertising Standards Council of India (“ASCI”), only 6% of the operators are currently having compliant consent banners embedded in their UI-UX, which itself states a huge gap. This necessitates the need for operators to assess their current UI-UX practices and design their UI-UX in compliance with the requirements under the DPDPA. Since Consent banners are no longer cosmetic elements of UI-UX, they are now regulatory touchpoints under the DPDPA. This article will examine consent banners as a vanguard of DPDPA compliance, analysing the choice architecture of operators and suggesting the best practices for operators and how they can stay DPDPA compliant.
Legal Framework of Consent under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023
The DPDPA positions Consent as the central organizing principle of India’s Data Protection Regime. DPDPA embeds Consent within a rights-based framework prioritising user agency, traceability, and accountability. Section 6 of the DPDPA sets out the legal requirement for a valid consent. Operators obtaining consent must ensure that the Consent is free, specific, informed, unconditional, and unambiguous, and must be expressed through clear affirmative action.
DPDPA links the validity of consent with purpose limitation, which means that operators cannot reuse the data collected for a specific purpose for any unrelated processing without the renewed consent of the customer. Importantly, the customer retains the right to withdraw consent at any time. This makes consent a dynamic, revocable permission from a static authorization. To operationalise consent, DPDPA introduces the concept of Consent Managers, which will act as an intermediary between the data principals and data fiduciaries, i.e., in our case, the customers (‘data principals’) and the operator (‘data fiduciaries’).
Furthermore, the Digital Personal Data Protection Rules 2025 (“Rules”) substantiate this role by prescribing neutrality, financial soundness, and technical capability as the qualifying conditions. Consent Managers are intended to reduce the informational asymmetry, standardise consent flow, and enable data principles to exercise granular control across multiple data fiduciaries. Moreover, the recently released Business Requirement Document for Consent Manager under the DPDPA (“BRD”) also operationalised the statutory consent framework via modular API-driven design. The BRD maps the legal obligations into technical components such as consent collection, validation, withdrawal, dashboards, audit trials and grievance mechanisms.
After understanding the legal framework of Consent it’s important to break down the statutory requirement of consent in the context of e-commerce operations:
Free Consent: For operators, it prohibits them from coercing the customers to provide consent, bundling essentials with optional extras like promotions and marketing, and asymmetric rejection costs such as multi-step-outs versus single click acceptance.
Specific Consent: It demands purpose-level granularity, thereby rejecting blanket approvals for marketing along with the core services as advertised on the website.
Informed Consent: It requires point of collection notices detailing data, purpose, withdrawal, and grievance paths with versioned mapping to prevent mismatch on the platform. For eg, every consecutive time a consent notice is served, it should come up as “version 2.0”, “version 2.1”, etc.
Unambiguous and Unconditional Consent: It excludes defaults tying consent to service access, adding robustness in the consent mechanism.
Clear Affirmative Action: It mandates explicit user gestures for operators such as unticked toggles, invalidating pre-ticked boxes, or implied silence.
Why Consent Banners are especially Complex in the E-Commerce Context?
For e-commerce operators, Consent Banners will pose a unique set of challenges and complexities due to the multi-stage data flow, high-pressure timings, and mobile constraints, thereby amplifying DPDPA compliance risks. In the DPDPA regime, the customer or the user journey demands granular consent across browsing the platform, checking the carts, and even personalization. So, the one-size-fits-all approach fails here; one single consent banner won’t make it. It will fail due to cognitive overload and fatigue.
Some of the barriers to effective consent in e-commerce are:
Multi-Stage Data Complexity: Consent must span through browsing the platform, i.e., recommendations; carts, i.e., abandonment tracking; checkouts, i.e., payments; delivery, i.e., logistics; and marketing, i.e., personalisation of goods or services offered, yet the consent banners bundle purposes, thereby violating the core requirement of DPDPA and risking granular processing.
Mobile UI-UX Constraints: Most of the Indian users navigate e-commerce platforms via smartphones, thereby relying heavily on thumb-based interaction for small screens. This mobile-first reality increased the cognitive and motor burden associated with the consent banners when compared to the desktop environment. Modal-based banners frequently obscure the core user journey, whereas checkbox driven consent mechanism requires a level of precision that is quite difficult to achieve in a fast scrolling, high-latency, or one-handed usage context. In practice, consent toggles and opt-out controls are often rendered too small to meet accessibility thresholds, and mobile-centric design constraints risk undermining the voluntariness and clarity required for valid consent under the DPDPA.
High-Pressure Timing: During flash sales, discounts, or gated offers on e-commerce websites/apps, prompts often trigger fear of missing out with timers for the customers, this eventually erodes the “free” and “informed” consent as customers prioritise speed over scrutiny and this results in voluntariness barriers for e-commerce operators, especially in the case of quick-commerce operators.
User Fatigue and Choice Overload: Repetitive consent pop-ups across the user session contribute significantly to consent fatigue, often nudging the user towards default acceptance rather than informed choice. This effect is particularly pronounced where platforms rely on saved user profiles, auto-opt-in mechanisms, or recurring prompts that replicate previously accepted flows. With time, these repetitions diminish the deliberative quality of consent, transforming affirmative action into habitual compliance.
Failure of One-Size-Fits-All Design: This issue is further aggravated by the widespread use of static, uniform consent banners that disregard contextual user journeys, interaction constraints, and cognitive limits. Rather than adapting to the nature of the transaction or the stage of user engagement, such designs rely on repetitive prompts and “nagging” techniques that verge on dark patterns, privileging formal acceptance over genuine choice. When consent interfaces function merely as symbolic compliance mechanisms, the validity of the resulting authorisation becomes questionable. In these cases, e-commerce operators (who are “data fiduciaries”) risk themselves of regulatory scrutiny by the Data Protection Board of India (“DPBI”) as consent secured via coercive UI-UX design may be rendered legally unenforceable notwithstanding technical adherence to statutory requirements.
Anatomy of a Consent Banner: Key Design Elements with DPDPA Implications and Best Practices
In the DPDPA regime, consent is no longer merely a UI-UX formality, but it’s a legally enforceable artefact. For e-commerce entities operating across complicated multi-user journeys, consent banner design directly determines compliance risk. Poorly designed UI-UX can result in invalid and uninformed consent despite all the technical implementation process, thereby exposing the operators to regulatory scrutiny from the DPBI.
The following are the key design elements of Consent Banners for e-commerce operators with their implications:
Placement and Timing of Consent Requests: On the e-commerce platforms, the consent requests must be contextually aligned with the point of data collection. So, operators can deploy just-in-time notice prior to checkout, for instance, in case of payment. This will improve transparency by clearly linking consent to a defined purpose. On the contrary, if front-loading multiple consent prompts at the entry point, then it will create a cognitive overload, thereby undermining user voluntariness and alarming regulatory scrutiny. Operators should avoid high-pressure prompts during flash sales as consent obtained under temporal pressure are risked of being characterised as coerced. For compliance, operators should present accept and reject options without time penalties and delayed access on their UI-UX.
Button Design and Visual Neutrality: In evidencing free, informed, and unambiguous consent, visual hierarchy will play a vital role. E-commerce operators should cater to UI-UX design where accept and reject options are equally prominent in size, colour, font weight, and placement, and they are accessible through a single interaction. Any UI-UX design prioritising acceptance through large buttons, dominant colours, or multi-step rejection flow might be viewed as a nudging mechanism rather than a genuine choice for the customers. Considering India’s massive mobile-first userbase, operators should ensure accessibility compliance within thumb-reachable zones with minimum contrast ratios and adequate spacing on the UI-UX to prevent involuntary consent.
Language and Disclosure Standards: While serving consent notices, e-commerce operators must use plain and purpose-specific language. They must refrain from using any broad or abstract phrasing in languages such as “collecting data for service improvement” or “we collect your data for providing an enhanced experience”. Instead, operators should clearly disclose the categories of data collected, the specific purposes for processing, retention periods, and grievance redressal mechanisms. Operators should also localise notices into regional languages for the customers, as well as in Hindi for the non-technical customer base. Thus, a clear and verifiable disclosure is a must for operators as consent records may be relied upon during the audit and enforcement proceedings.
Granularity and User Control: E-commerce operators should offer separate toggles for different processing activities such as marketing, analytics, and personalisation rather than a bundled consent, as valid consent under the DPDPA requires purpose-based granularity. As bundled consents will violate the purpose limitations principle, invalidating processing chains in multi-stage flows like carts or delivery points in the e-commerce platforms. Operators should consider layered notice structures in their UI-UX where they combine concise summaries with expandable details, allowing customers informed choices without overwhelming them. They should also implement CMS-driven dashboards enabling the customers to review, modify, or withdraw consent at anytime. This withdrawal workflow must propagate across internal systems to prevent continued data processing beyond the authorised purposes.
In order to operationalise DPDPA compliance, E-commerce operators should audit existing user journeys from onboarding via post-purchase engagement, identifying consent fatigue and friction points. They should also prioritise mobile-centric usability testing, considering the huge smartphone subscriber base in India. Operators should focus on robust documentation for their internal workflow, such as consent timestamps, notice versions, and technical logs, as this will serve as critical evidence in regulatory inquiries and internal audits.
Dark Patterns in Consent Banners: Where E-Commerce Platforms Go Wrong
E-commerce platforms have often been seen using dark patterns in their UI/UX, and in the DPDPA regime, free and informed consent remains the top priority for compliance. Dark patterns directly undermine the statutory requirements under the DPDPA, and operators might be exposed to regulatory actions if found using dark patterns, leading to reputational loss.
Herein are the legal risks that dark patterns pose to e-commerce and practical mitigation steps for them:
UI-UX Design Techniques | Risk | Mitigation Measures |
Hidden Reject Options | Use of a visually de-emphasised “declined” button or links coerces users towards acceptance, thereby compromising voluntariness and the unambiguous nature of the consent. | E-commerce operators should consider presenting accept and reject actions with equal prominence, i.e., size, placement, font weight. Operators should ensure single-click parity and WCAG compliance contrast in the thumb zones for their mobile-based UI-UX design. |
Pre-Selected Check-Boxes | Use of any default opt-ins may substitute affirmative action with a passive assent, thereby contravening the affirmative action standard for a valid consent. This risk will invalidate downstream processing that relied on supposed consent. | E-commerce operators should consider using unticked toggles only and also providing discrete category choices such as analytics, marketing, personalization, etc. For the purpose of audit, operators should log explicit user gestures with timestamps and technical identifiers. |
Consent fatigue loops | Use of the same consent pop-ups again and again will make the users click “accept” without really thinking. Over time, this will weaken the idea of informed consent, especially in a long e-commerce journey like browsing, checkout, and delivery. | E-commerce operators should consider asking for consent only once for each clear purpose. They should remember the user’s choice across sessions and give users an easy way to withdraw consent later via a simple dashboard. |
Emotional and Urgency Nudges | Use of banners that create pressure or fear, like “Don’t miss out!” or “Only Limited Time left” or “if not now, then never” push users to agree quickly without understanding what they are consenting to, thereby making it consent not freely given and that too uninformed. | E-commerce operators should consider using calm, neutral language that clearly explains why data is needed; for instance, “We use your email to send offers. You can stop this anytime!”. They should also consider designing the messages in simple languages and local languages so that all users can understand them easily. |
The DPDPA marks a decisive shift in India’s data protection regime by transforming consent from a peripheral compliance formality into a legally enforceable right. For e-commerce operators, this shift has far-reaching implications. Now that consent can no longer be secured through generic banners or bundled permission, it must be designed, captured, and maintained via interfaces that demonstrably uphold user autonomy, transparency, and purpose limitations. In this framework, UI-UX design becomes a site of legal accountability. As we discussed, the complexities of e-commerce operations make consent compliance particularly challenging; the core idea remains that one size fits all banner won’t work for e-commerce operations in the DPDPA regime. At the same time, DPDPA provides a clear compliance pathway for the foundation of legally sustainable consent interfaces. The integration of consent management systems, audit trials and documented UI-UX decision-making further strengthens defensibility in the enforcement and dispute context. On a concluding note, DPDPA compliance is not achieved by adding more banners but re-engineering consent as a continuous, user-centric process embedded within platform architecture, and for e-commerce operators, the challenge and opportunity lie in aligning legal standards with the design practice.
The Author is an Advocate based in New Delhi. Views Are Personal
