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Piecing Together Price Personalization: A guest talk Pratiksha Ashok 

Price personalization is not a common or popular topic of discussion, but you wouldn’t be able to guess that if you had attended Ms. Pratiksha Ashok’s talk at the Shiv Nadar School of Law. It was an extremely engaging and interactive lecture, with questions popping up from the lecturer as well as the audience. Ms. Ashok was clear from the start, the purpose of the talk was not to provide answers but to help us ask questions. Questions about things like why people are offered different prices for the same product, or whether the current legislation on data protection sufficiently covers all bases. 

While one might imagine that a talk about data would be dry, Ms. Ashok kept things entertaining by making connections and references to pop-culture that students were familiar with. Price personalization is the phenomenon of different customers being offered different prices based on data collected by sellers or service providers. This could include browsing behaviour, geographic data, purchasing history etc. She started by explaining the conceptual difference between discrimination and differential treatment. She brought up the golden triangle—the right to equality, right to life and right to freedom. With this context, she brought up K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India. That case placed the right to privacy under the right to life, which led to Ms. Ashok raising the question that, despite privacy being a fundamental right data, why were there no cases regarding privacy violations. This is because India has an enforcement problem. Due to this, despite laws existing little action actually happens. 

Regarding price personalization, three legal frameworks are relevant to this conversation. The Digital Personal Data Protection, 2023; Consumer Protection Act, 2019 and Competition Law. This, she explained, is a fragmented approach and not cohesive since there was no singular legal framework that addressed or regulated price personalization in India. 

Towards the end of the talk, questions were opened up for the audience which led to interesting questions from students, built on the concepts taught by Ms. Ashok. One interesting question posed by a student was regarding price personalization directed towards communities. This was when Ms. Ashok distinguished differential treatment from discrimination. Price personalization doesn’t have to be directed only towards individuals but could also be directed towards communities. 

(Report prepared by Tejal Mohaanty, photographs by Ritika Narayanan)