Session 1: Protecting and empowering consumers in the digital transition
Oct 8, 2024 | 2:00 PM - 4:00 PMCC15
Oct 8, 2024 | 2:00 PM - 4:00 PM
CC15
Description
Digital markets offer consumers easy access to goods, services, and information, and digital technologies hold the promise of improving their lives. However, these markets often fail to deliver their full benefits to consumers. Digital business models and technologies can exacerbate information and structural power asymmetries, facilitating harmful business practices. These include manipulative online design, fake reviews, subversive personalisation, pervasive tracking, exploitation of behavioural biases, illegal algorithmic discrimination, fraud and scams. Such practices can weaken consumer choice and trust and create an uneven playing field for businesses. All consumers may be vulnerable to them and some groups, defined for example by age or gender, may face particular risks The consequences can be substantial, ranging from financial loss, privacy erosion to psychological harm. A strong consumer policy environment is needed to protect consumers and ensure trust in digital markets. This session will explore the opportunities and challenges of the digital transition for consumers, the actions consumer policy makers and enforcers can take, and where further research is needed.
