Your Privacy Is Important to Us!

Your Privacy Is Important to Us!
explores the application of EU consumer law—including data protection
law and other fundamental rights—to data-driven business models that
infringe on human agency, social cohesion and democratic debate. It
suggests how our current legal framework can be informed by
psychological, technological and societal perspectives to curb predatory
business models of surveillance capitalism.
The book elucidates the potential for
cross-fertilisation between data protection law and marketing law, and
it demonstrates how the protection of human dignity, privacy and
non-discrimination may corroborate these legal disciplines. It is argued
that ‘paying with personal data’ is a misleading framing when, in fact,
we pay with attention and agency—which are both scarcer and more
precious than personal data and are also important in social and
societal contexts. A three-tiered model of information asymmetry is
introduced to illustrate why information does not ensure transparency,
which is a prerequisite for user empowerment.
The aim is to inform and amplify ongoing debates by
providing a coherent framing of data-driven marketing in the context of
law, psychology, technology and society.
Jan Trzaskowski, Ph.D., is Law Professor at
Copenhagen Business School and Aalborg University. Since the mid-1990s,
he has dealt with legal and regulatory aspects of information
technology, and his research focuses on the protection of consumers and
fundamental rights, including privacy. He was Head of the Danish
delegation negotiating the 2000 E-Commerce Directive and is founder of
the Business in Democracy Initiative (BiDEM).
Eric K. Clemons, Ph.D., is Professor Emeritus at The Wharton School and author of New Patterns of Power and Profit.