In an opinion published on Tuesday 24 February, EDRi, the digital rights defence collective, laid the foundations for what the future legislation on digital fairness, the ‘Digital Fairness Act’ (DFA) should look like: “a new Regulation on structural fairness”.
According to the organisation, the DFA should be designed as a legislative response to the “structural problems” posed by ‘dark patterns’ (manipulative or misleading Internet interfaces) and addictive designs. Subjects that are not currently covered by existing regulations, such as the Digital Services Act (DSA) or the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Act.
EDRi wants to introduce a structural “duty of fairness” for businesses, to prohibit all digital services “being designed in ways that unfairly exploit or manipulate its users”.
It also proposes the introduction of a block list of certain prohibited practices in terms of addictive design and misleading interfaces, and a grey list of practices the necessity of which would have to be “justified” by the platform.
Finally, EDRi also calls for a ban on “personalised advertising that exploits users’ vulnerabilities”, and for access to a non-personalised service to be guaranteed, without any loss of quality or functionality.
See the publication: https://aeur.eu/f/kw3 (Original version in French by Isalia Stieffatre)