When the Price Knows You: The Missing Indian Legal Framework for Personalised Pricing in Digital Marketplaces

Digital marketplaces can increasingly tailor prices or commercial offers using location, browsing history, purchase history, device signals and other behavioural data. This creates a legal problem distinct from ordinary dynamic pricing. A price that changes because aggregate demand changes is familiar; a price that changes because a platform predicts that a particular consumer is willing or able to pay more raises questions of transparency, privacy, autonomy, discrimination and market power. India has no dedicated rule requiring a digital seller to disclose that a price has been personalised through automated decision-making. The Consumer Protection Act, 2019, the Consumer Protection (E-Commerce) Rules, 2020, the Guidelines for Prevention and Regulation of Dark Patterns, 2023, the Competition Act, 2002 and the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 provide partial protection, but they regulate different parts of the problem. This article examines whether the existing Indian framework adequately addresses personalised pricing. It uses doctrinal research supported by regulatory reports, international comparative material and empirical studies on consumer responses. It finds that the principal gap is the absence of a clear, ex ante transparency duty and an auditable framework for establishing when personal data materially influences price. The European Union's express disclosure rule provides a useful model, while the United States' recent surveillance-pricing inquiry demonstrates the need for regulatory visibility into pricing technologies. The article recommends a proportionate Indian regime based on disclosure, data-purpose specificity, algorithmic record-keeping, risk-based auditing, protection against discriminatory variables and accessible redress. The objective is not to prohibit legitimate dynamic pricing, but to prevent opaque data - driven price discrimination.