The rules of a public price radar

AnHarga is a specification for a crowd-photographed, receipt-verified national price index, staged against a real mandate — the Price Control and Anti-Profiteering Act 2011 and the existing eHarga portal it would sit beside. As of this writing it is designed, not running: the shape, the legal grounding and the density maths are real, but no ministry instance is deployed and no national feed is operated. These terms describe the intended rules, not a live commercial contract, and should be read as a proposal until an agreement is executed with the signatory ministry.

The index is designed to be operated by, and for, a single accountable ministry (KPDN) as one national instance — not a multi-tenant data product, not a reseller feed, and not an ad-funded consumer app. That posture is the point: a price index only carries public trust if exactly one public body owns the mandate and no private party monetises the underlying receipts. Access tiers, if any, exist to serve enforcement and policy, never to sell the crowd back to itself.

Contributors agree to submit only redacted price evidence: a shelf label or a masked receipt line for an item in an area. Never personal data of a shopper or cashier, never loyalty or payment numbers, never an un-redacted document, and never a fabricated, edited or replayed receipt. Attempting to name and accuse a specific store, or to game a band with planted observations, is a material breach and grounds for removal and referral.

Output is a statistical price band for an item in an area across many independent observations. It is not proof of an offence by any named merchant, and it is not a substitute for enforcement due process, which remains a separate, human, legal track. Below the k-anonymity floor an area reads nothing on purpose — an honest silence is fairer to a shop than a lone reading presented as fact. You are responsible for how you act on any band the index returns.

Aggregate bands are published as an open national data utility under a share-alike licence. It exists to prevent any participant — including the founding contributor — from enclosing the crowd’s price signal or claiming exclusive rights over an index built from everyone’s receipts. You may build products and analyses on top of the bands; you may not take the aggregate signal itself private.

A band is a crowd-sensing estimate held to a published confidence floor (a target of roughly ±1–2% against official series where density allows), offered without warranty of completeness or fitness for a particular decision. Coverage is uneven by design — dense districts resolve, thin ones stay silent — and the index is a companion to, never a replacement for, the official CPI and departmental price series.

These terms, and any participation agreement built on them, are governed by the laws of Malaysia, with personal-data handling aligned to the Personal Data Protection Act 2024. Questions about the proposal, a reference basket, or a seat at the founding table go to anharga@antrex.app or the Antrex contact desk at antrex.app/contact.