Related papers: Regulating Dark Patterns
Consumer agency in the digital age is increasingly constrained by systemic barriers and algorithmic manipulation, raising concerns about the authenticity of consumption choices. Nowadays, financial decisions are shaped by external pressures…
Compliance with the European Union's Platform-to-Business (P2B) Regulation is challenging for online platforms, and assessing their compliance can be difficult for public authorities. This is partly due to the lack of automated tools for…
Self-ordering kiosks (SOKs) are widely deployed in fast food restaurants, transforming food ordering into digitally mediated, self-navigated interactions. While these systems enhance efficiency and average order value, they also create…
Digitalization in many economic sectors drove the financial system to adapt to new paradigms of technological transformation. Moreover, the extant regulatory framework forced the financial system to reconsider its business models and its…
What does the Digital Services Act (DSA) mean for online advertising? We describe and analyse the DSA rules that are most relevant for online advertising and adtech (advertising technology). We also highlight to what extent the DSA's…
Digital platforms use recommendations to facilitate exchanges between platform actors, such as trade between buyers and sellers. Aiming to protect consumers and guarantee fair competition on platforms, legislators increasingly require that…
Information has exploded on the Internet and mobile with the advent of the big data era. In particular, recommendation systems are widely used to help consumers who struggle to select the best products among such a large amount of…
Algorithmic recommendations mediate interactions between millions of customers and products (in turn, their producers and sellers) on large e-commerce marketplaces like Amazon. In recent years, the producers and sellers have raised concerns…
Web tracking is a pervasive and opaque practice that enables personalized advertising, retargeting, and conversion tracking. Over time, it has evolved into a sophisticated and invasive ecosystem, employing increasingly complex techniques to…
The Omnibus Directive is an essential part of the European Union's New Deal for Consumers. The Directive introduces new regulations in trade, including e-commerce, with the main goal being to increase transparency, fairness and consumer…
Deceptive patterns (DPs) are user interface designs deliberately crafted to manipulate users into unintended decisions, often by exploiting cognitive biases for the benefit of companies or services. While numerous studies have explored ways…
By filtering the content that users see, social media platforms have the ability to influence users' perceptions and decisions, from their dining choices to their voting preferences. This influence has drawn scrutiny, with many calling for…
Algorithmic discrimination is a critical concern as machine learning models are used in high-stakes decision-making in legally protected contexts. Although substantial research on algorithmic bias and discrimination has led to the…
We study the online constrained ranking problem motivated by an application to web-traffic shaping: an online stream of sessions arrive in which, within each session, we are asked to rank items. The challenge involves optimizing the ranking…
Advancements in machine learning have fuelled the popularity of using AI decision algorithms in procedures such as bail hearings (Feller et al. 2016), medical diagnoses (Rajkomar et al. 2018; Esteva et al. 2019) and recruitment (Heilweil…
It has proved to be difficult to translate the lessons from the literature on universal service into the policy framework because of political interests and regulatory capture. Neither the USA or Europe has made a very good job of devising…
The European legislature has proposed the Digital Services Act (DSA) and Artificial Intelligence Act (AIA) to regulate platforms and Artificial Intelligence (AI) products. We review to what extent third-party audits are part of both laws…
Data-driven decision-making consequential to individuals raises important questions of accountability and justice. Indeed, European law provides individuals limited rights to 'meaningful information about the logic' behind significant,…
The online advertising market has recently reached the 500 billion dollar mark. To accommodate the need to match a user with the highest bidder at a fraction of a second, it has moved towards a complex, automated and often opaque model that…
The internet can be broadly divided into three parts: surface, deep and dark. The dark web has become notorious in the media for being a hidden part of the web where all manner of illegal activities take place. This review investigates how…