Digital Fairness for Consumers

The New Digital Fairness (NDF) project is a research and advocacy initiative launched by BEUC with support from the Adessium Foundation, seeking to address the challenges and potential harms caused to consumers, citizens and societies by the use of new technologies and business models in today’s digital economy. The present report arrives in direct succession of the EU Consumer Protection 2.0 (EUCP2.0) project and builds on the conceptual framework developed at that stage of the research, particularly in regard to the disempowerment of consumers due to asymmetries of knowledge and power, new categories of consumer vulnerability caused and aggravated by algorithmic environments as well as omnipresent surveillance and behavioural personalisation. This work takes the analysis further, identifying systemic processes gradually weakening the position of consumers in the digitalised markets. It also shows the way forward, by proposing a regulatory framework that would strengthen and safeguard consumers and provide a digital market that is safe and fair to them by design and by default. The broad applicability and technological neutrality of horizontal consumer law render it a fitting vehicle for protecting the needs and safeguarding the rights of modern-day digital consumers. In the light of the ongoing, EU ‘digital fairness’ fitness check assessment of consumer law, this work proposes specific solutions and recommendations that could form the backbone of EU’s regulatory response to the age of digital asymmetries that should be the Digital Fairness Act. This publication constitutes independent research that was commissioned by BEUC, the European Consumer Organisationpean Consumer Organisation