AI Driven Recommendations and Consumer Awareness of Transparency and Misleading Claims in Bangladesh

Automated recommendations organise commercial visibility, yet consumers’ support for transparency should not be equated with demonstrated knowledge of recommendation practices or legal remedies. This study examines that distinction using the supplied Group 7 database of 385 adult, consenting, AI-aware respondents in Bangladesh. Law students account for 232 observations; recent online-shopping experience is not independently established. Rather than combine heterogeneous questionnaire blocks into latent constructs, the analysis uses item distributions, paired endorsement contrasts, joint response patterns, rank correlations and adjusted binary and ordinal models. Agreement that misleading AI-generated claims create consumer-protection concerns reaches 81.0%, compared with 56.1% for understanding recommendation influence. Personalisation disclosure receives 69.4% endorsement, while 60.5% endorse clear information about sponsored or manipulated recommendations. Transparency’s perceived decision value exceeds self-reported manipulation recognition by 13.8 percentage points. The four questionnaire blocks have low internal consistency, with alpha between 0.158 and 0.201. No focal predictor survives multiplicity correction in the primary binary model of misleading-claims awareness. Influence awareness is positively associated with the outcome in an ordinal sensitivity model, indicating dependence on outcome coding. These findings distinguish broad protection preferences from narrower self-reported capabilities without establishing a causal literacy pathway, objective legal competence or actual complaint behaviour. The contribution is a consumer-autonomy framework linking recommendation visibility to information usability and contestability. Platform recommendations prioritise intelligible sponsorship labels, accessible explanations and practical evidence preservation. The findings concern a legally oriented sample and should inform targeted behavioural research rather than estimates of national consumer competence.