Personal data as means of payment: a Nordic perspective on the role of consumer protection agencies in a time of aggressive data collection

Beskrivning

This paper focuses commercial data practices where the customer "pays" with her own
personal data, as opposed or in addition to money, for a service. The question here,
placed in a Nordic and Swedish context, is then to what extent, in what way and for which practices is it meaningful to regard personal information as means of payment? The reason for this framing is here primarily linked to consumer law settings in the Nordic countries, guarded by authorities such as the Swedish Consumer Agency, that has a supervisory responsibility, not the least in being the consumer ombudsman with the right to take on cases against market players, for the protection of consumers.

The paper therefore ties on to questions of personalized and predictive analytics as a consumer protection issue rather than primarily a privacy issue. For example, how could a supervisory and ombudsman role be used to deal with specific issues of: dynamic and individualized pricing tailored to a consumer's profile and purchasing history in order to sell at the highest possible price to the individual consumer. For example, what supervisory tools are needed? Online user agreements and the consent dilemma. Critics argue that this kind of "privacy self-management" does not provide meaningful control and that there is a need to move beyond relying too heavily on it (Solove, 2013); e.g., media scholar and digital sociologist Anja Bechmann posits that "the consent culture of the internet has turned into a blind non-informed consent culture" (Bechmann, 2014, p. 21). But the fact remains that this is one of the most common ways to regulate the handling of personal customer data between the commercial party and the individual customers. How active should a consumer protection agency preferably be in empowering the "non-informed" but
formally consenting consumers?

Period	2017 juni 22
Evenemangstitel	Data power conference 2017
Typ av evenemang	Konferens
Plats	Ottawa, KanadaVisa på karta
Omfattning	Internationell