CADP Coordinator in LiveLaw: What the PhysicsWallah Order Misses About the DPDP Act

On 1 June 2026, the Central Consumer Protection Authority fined PhysicsWallah five lakh rupees over dark patterns in its checkout and registration flows. A pre-ticked box added a ten rupee donation to the PW Foundation at checkout, collecting roughly 2.47 crore rupees from more than 21 lakh users between February 2024 and December 2025. Access to courses advertised as free was conditioned on handing over a phone number and an email address, behind a registration wall the platform could not show was functionally necessary.

Shambhunath Yadiyapur, Coordinator of the Centre for Applied Data Protection, argues in LiveLaw that the order stops where the harder question starts. The CCPA treated the conduct as an unfair trade practice and left untouched whether the underlying collection of personal data was lawful under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023. Consent extracted through a pre-ticked box is not the free and specific consent the Act requires, and a registration wall with no demonstrated necessity sits badly with the rule that a data fiduciary may collect only the personal data needed for the stated purpose. An EdTech platform serving school students carries the additional duties the Act imposes for children's data on top of that.

So the same facts sit inside two regimes, and only one regulator has looked at them. India now has consumer protection and data protection authorities whose jurisdictions overlap on identical conduct, with no mechanism for either to hand its factual findings to the other. For organisations, the practical lesson is that clearing one regulator settles nothing. A consent flow that survives an unfair trade practice review can still fail on lawful basis, purpose limitation, and children's data. Audit the flow against both, and treat a pre-ticked box as an admission rather than a design choice.

Read the full article, Dark Patterns And Data Protection: What PhysicsWallah Order Reveals About India's Digital Regulatory Gap, on LiveLaw.