Cognitive Liberty: Contestable Standards for Deceptive Digital Design

Digital consumer protection needs a contestable method for distinguishing persuasion from deception and obstruction. This paper develops a bounded Cognitive Liberty proposal around informed consent, cancellation, and accurate presentation of material terms. Existing US consumer-protection statutes, selected FTC enforcement actions, and original research inform an auditable protocol. The proposed protocol preserves interface versions, specifies realistic user tasks, records objective discrepancies, and uses preregistered experiments where causal effects are in dispute. Financial injury, unwanted data disclosure, and measures of comprehension remain distinct from clinical outcomes or a general attention-harm score. A conformity pathway would require evidence, independent challenge, accessibility testing, and proportional remedies; it would not create blanket immunity from enforcement. The paper also distinguishes the vacated 2024 FTC negative-option amendments from the new 2026 advance notice of proposed rulemaking. A staged evaluation begins with consent and cancellation tasks before considering more contested engagement features. Harm-indexed taxation is retained as a research option whose measurement, incidence, and legal basis remain unresolved. No new experiment or empirical harm estimate is reported. Status: Policy working paper, version 1.0; not peer reviewed. The Maha Principle: Policy Working Papers, No. 03. No new experiment, dataset, or empirical harm estimate is reported. Companion book: The Maha Principle: The Architecture of Human Flourishing, by Mayone Maha Rajan. Paperback (ISBN 9798160702506) and Kindle ebook (ASIN B0H62WLMT5). The book provides philosophical motivation, not empirical validation. Provenance and related work: Developed from Platform III of the Maha Strategies policy collection. Related policy papers: Paying for Nutrition and Chemical Reciprocity. Disclosure: ChatGPT generated manuscript passages and assisted with research, adaptation, checking, and formatting. The named author directs the work and accepts responsibility for the released paper, and has a commercial interest in the companion book. Core sources were rechecked on 3 November 2026; this is not independent peer review or legal advice.