Abstract

In times where the world is connecting digitally, the boundary between smart consumption and covert surveillance are also becoming burred. This paper examines the ongoing practice of consumer data collection at India’s retail stores, focussing mainly on the covert mechanisms employed in order to collect personal data under the pretext of convenience and saving environment. India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 (“DPDP Act”) explicitly prohibits the mandatory collection of personal information as a precondition for purchase. But the retail stores in India have outmanoeuvred this legislative mandate. The DPDP Act relies on a consent-based framework which seems to be undermined by these very conditions of retail transactions where integrity of consent is being compromised. These entities, instead of abandoning data collection, have reformulated such practices under seemingly harmless narratives by gathering customer details in the name of paperless billing, protecting environment, loyalty points and much more. The most vulnerable citizens are repeatedly asked for their phone numbers in lieu of a grocery bill and they have been conditioned to the extent that they have accepted this exchange as regular and normal in their day to day life. This paper argues that such practices represent an advanced development of surveillance capitalism within the Indian retail atmosphere, where consent is being manufactured rather than meaningfully obtained. In line with the provisions of the DPDP Act and its broader frameworks of informational privacy, the study critically evaluates the requirement, suitability and stricter compliance of existing regulatory mechanisms, strengthened consumer awareness and redefining of consent frameworks that place genuine autonomy at the centre of India’s evolving data protection jurisprudence, in order to address these nascent evasion tactics. It further explores the intersection of retail data collection with smart grid ecosystems, where granular consumption data enables deep behavioural profiling of households.

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