The checkout is where
compliance is decided.

The Consumer Protection Act, 2019 defines a misleading advertisement in terms that reach well past outright falsehood. An advertisement is misleading if it falsely describes a product or service, gives a false guarantee to consumers or is likely to mislead them as to the nature, substance, quantity or quality of the product or service, conveys an express or implied representation that would amount to an unfair trade practice, or deliberately conceals important information. That last limb is the one businesses trip on. A claim accurate in every word can still mislead if a material condition stays invisible until after the customer has paid for something. The question is what the advertisement conveys to a consumer reading it in the ordinary way, not what a careful reader could have worked out from it with effort and a second screen.

The Central Consumer Protection Authority’s Guidelines for Prevention of Misleading Advertisements and Endorsements for Misleading Advertisements, 2022, add the operational detail. They address bait advertising, where a product is advertised without a reasonable prospect of supplying demand at that price; free claims, where the cost is in fact recovered somewhere else; surrogate advertising for goods that cannot lawfully be advertised; and advertisements addressed to children, which are restricted from exaggerating features, claiming benefits a product does not have, or suggesting that a child who does not have the product is inferior. They also require due diligence from the advertiser, from the manufacturer or service provider, and from the advertising agency, which means the brand cannot treat a claim as the agency’s problem once the campaign is running. We work through claim substantiation with marketing teams before publication, which usually means asking who holds the evidence for each statement and in what form it exists. Substantiation frequently rests on material that was never retained, and the campaign then has to be rebuilt around what can actually be shown rather than around what everyone believed to be true.

Disclaimers get their own treatment. One cannot contradict the main claim, cannot be used to repair a claim that is misleading in itself, and has to be legible in the medium where it appears.

An endorsement carries obligations for the endorser as well as for the brand. Where a material connection exists between the two, it has to be disclosed clearly and prominently. Guidance from the Central Consumer Protection Authority treats material connection broadly, extending beyond payment to benefits such as free products, discounts, trips, hotel stays, awards, equity, employment and personal relationships. The disclosure has to be hard to miss rather than technically present. Placement at the end of a long caption, inside a block of hashtags, or behind a link is unlikely to satisfy the requirement, and guidance indicates that disclosures in video should be visible on screen, and audible where the endorsement is spoken. Brands ask whether a hashtag will do. That depends on where it sits and whether a viewer would take it in before forming a view of the post, which is a question about the particular creative rather than one that can be settled in advance for every campaign. The safer habit is to fix the wording and its position in the brief, so the question does not have to be asked twice.

The endorser is also expected to exercise due diligence, and to have actually used the product where the endorsement claims personal experience. For brands the response is contractual. The endorsement agreement should set out the disclosure wording and where it goes, give the brand approval over the creative before publication, require correction or removal within a stated period on request, and allocate liability for a failure to disclose. Leaving disclosure to the individual’s judgement transfers no real risk, since action against an endorser rarely leaves the brand untouched.

Self-regulatory codes for influencer advertising are also relevant. They are not statutory, but their standards shape what is expected of a brand.

The Central Consumer Protection Authority’s Guidelines for Prevention and Regulation of Dark Patterns, 2023 identify specified interface practices as falling within unfair trade practices under the Act. The named practices include false urgency, where scarcity or a countdown is stated without basis; basket sneaking, where items or charges are added without the consumer’s deliberate act; confirm-shaming, where declining is framed to induce guilt; forced action, where an unrelated purchase, subscription or data disclosure is made a condition of proceeding; subscription traps, where cancellation is made harder than signup or no clear cancellation route exists; drip pricing, where the true total emerges only late in the flow; and bait and switch, where the item advertised is swapped for another at the point of purchase. The list runs beyond these. Two things set the subject apart from ordinary advertising compliance. The conduct is embedded in software, so a single design decision repeats across every session and every user, and that scale is precisely what attracts attention to it. The practices are also, usually, the output of optimisation rather than intent. A team testing variants for conversion will find confirm-shaming and basket sneaking on its own, reliably, because they work. The distance between a growth experiment and an unfair trade practice can be a single default state on a single checkbox, and nothing in an ordinary release process is built to notice the difference.

Nobody sets out to build a dark pattern. The experiment selects for it, and the team that ran the experiment reads the result as a win rather than as a term of the contract.

Review at design, while the flow is still a wireframe, and again before a test is promoted to default, comes earlier in the sequence than review shortly before launch. The checks themselves are specific. Where a countdown or a stock indicator appears, is there evidence that the underlying constraint is real, kept in a form you could produce later. Are add-ons unticked by default. Is the total, including every mandatory charge, shown at the first point a price is stated rather than only at payment. Is the cancellation path any longer than the signup path. Is the declining option worded neutrally. A checklist of that size can sit with the product team and reach us only when a variant touches one of the points on it. Where a test introduces a new charge, a new consent or a new commitment, it comes to us before it goes live. Where it changes a colour or a headline, it does not, and the team stops treating legal review as a queue.

Documentation is the other half. For a business running many experiments, being able to reconstruct what a particular customer saw on a particular date separates a defensible position from an assertion. That means retaining variant records, the copy used, and the dates each was live, and recording the reasoning where a judgement call was made. A considered decision that a practice was permissible reads very differently, a year later, from no thought at all.

Some categories carry their own advertising rules on top of the general ones. Claims about food products, including nutrition and health claims, fall within the Food Safety and Standards (Advertising and Claims) Regulations, 2018, made under the Food Safety and Standards Act, 2006. Advertisements suggesting treatment or cure for specified conditions are restricted by the Drugs and Magic Remedies (Objectionable Advertisements) Act, 1954, which operates by reference to the diseases and conditions listed in its Schedule and catches a fair amount of wellness marketing whose authors never thought of it as medical. Cosmetics, electronics and financial products each attract requirements of their own. One campaign can therefore sit under general consumer law, sectoral regulation and a self-regulatory code at the same time, and each applies on its own terms. Working out which apply is usually quicker than the argument about who owns the answer.

The Consumer Protection Act, 2019 empowers the Central Consumer Protection Authority to investigate, to order that a misleading advertisement be discontinued or modified, to require corrective advertising, to impose penalties on the manufacturer, advertiser or publisher, and to prohibit an endorser from making endorsements for a specified period, with higher maxima for subsequent contraventions. The monetary limits on those penalties and the maximum period of a prohibition are set by the Act and should be checked against it, and the Act provides a defence for an endorser who has exercised due diligence. Enforcement also brings a live campaign down, requires a flow the revenue forecast was written around to be rebuilt, and can be accompanied by individual consumer complaints on the same practice filed in parallel. Those complaints arrive in forums scattered across the country, on facts that are identical, and each of them has to be answered.