All the power to the consumers!

After the last edition, devoted in particular to Big Data, also this year the Euroconsumers Seminar continued  to explore the field of digital innovation, with a focus on Artificial Intelligence, in order to further position  the 5 national Organizations of the Consumers Group, Test Achats/Test Aankoop (Belgium), OCU (Spain),  Deco Proteste (Portugal), Altroconsumo (Italy) and Proteste (Brazil), representing altogether more than 1.5  million consumers, at frontier issues.   4 are the main trends that emerged clearly from our analysis and the frank and open debates with preeminent representatives of Institutions, market players and academia:

• The digital ecosystem is clearly unbalanced – In the last few years a strong reduction in the  competitive dynamics has meant that, despite the technological development remained strong and  constant, the added value transferred to the final consumers by the big players of the Internet has  significantly shrunk;
• More and more consumers express their fundamental rights as citizens within digital platforms,  privately owned and regulated by terms of services and the public enforcement shows all its limits of  intervention in these cases;
• The spread of predictive algorithms and machine learning, even if still in an early stage, clearly  demonstrates that, together with high opportunities for consumers’ welfare, are already foreseeable  worrying risks with regard to an unacceptable compression of freedom of choice;
• Monetization of data should always be possible provided that consumers clearly express their  consent and have a fair share in the value created by means of the treatment of their data. 

All this considered, it appears urgent to rebalance the digital ecosystem by means of bottom‐up incentives  to create critical masses of consumers catalyzed by leading Organizations like ours that, interpreting  consumers’ protection in an evolutionary way, by enhancing consumers economic interest within the (digital)  market will foster and enable its more efficient and competitive development.

On the one side, we want to become the frontrunners of private enforcement, acting against clear and  unacceptable infringements of consumer rights, like in the case of our class action vs Facebook for the misuse  of consumers’ data, for which we gathered already more than 50.000 consumers in 4 jurisdictions. On the  other hand – and this is even more important –we are ready to work with leading responsible market players  to leveraging the benefits of technological evolutions to the whole ecosystem, as a founding condition for a  more stable social economic development on the basis of a new digital value chain.

There is not real innovation if it does not bring benefits to the end consumers, to citizens, to the People. The  digital economy can indeed only flourish and avoid a very dangerous degeneration by restoring consumers,  citizens, the People to a central position in its evolution. That’s why we need to become relevant in all the  societies and markets where we operate. We are ready to take this high challenge and feel all the  responsibilities with it.

When it comes to Artificial Intelligence the main objective of our collaboration with market players will be  to guarantee that AI will not destroy or take over human being but reinforce and potentiate us. Meanwhile,  while safeguarding the central role of the human being in the information society, we need to ensure also  that fundamental rights are written in computer codes by default, guarateeing that the core values of our  society remain firm and will not be altered in a society where machines will count more and more.  #AI4Consumers