European consumer summit
07 April 2009
Last week I attended the European Consumer Summit entitled' Consumer Trust in the Digital Market Place' organised by Commissioner Kuneva, the European Union Commissioner for Consumer affairs. There has been an annual consumer event of some sort for several years, but it has been a rather smaller affair in the past. This year the Commissioner was intent on making it a much more substantive event. With an opening address from the European President (who was otherwise engaged at the G20 summit), it spanned three days with a variety of activities bringing consumer and citizen groups together with each other and with industry and other bodies.
Commissioner Kuneva restated the vision for a digital Europe fit for consumers, which she presented in London in 2008 and updated on progress so far. In particular she mentioned the implementation of legislation which she believes paves the way to open up e-commerce (the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive and the Consumer Rights Directive in particular, the latter will introduce core consumer rights and obligations). She went on to say that notwithstanding this legislative framework, a recent report on e-commerce shows consumers are not yet purchasing cross-border and then spent the rest of her speech talking about the need to build consumer trust to to support cross border trade, focusing on the specific issues of privacy and data collection and especially on-line advertising. This concern with on-line advertising and privacy was picked up by all the speakers including the new Chairman of Ofcom, who made her first public speech in this role.
Industry contributors made no apology for the fact that their ambition was to use data about consumers to help them turn advertising into someting as close to information as possible - so closely targeted that consumers would find it helpful not intrusive. There is no question that consumers see a benefit in this type of targeting; our recent research ' No one should miss out' found that consumers valued the way their data could be used to deliver relevant material and exclude unwanted or intrusive offerings. But, excited though they were by the personalised feedback offered on web sites like Amazon and e-bay, they were more concerned about the potential for their data to be misused or abused.
The participants at the summit were also very concerned about these issues. Solutions varied from banning behavioural advertising and other such practices to some combination of high level legislative framework, industry standards and company policies. As the discussion proceeded it became clear to me that if any such initiatives are to gain the trust and confidence of citizens and consumers, we need to be invited into the tent to help shape the legislation, the codes and the policies; if policy makers, regulators and even companies see fit to design solutions to these problems without reference to consumers and citizens themselves, we are far less likely to find them fit for purpose.
Anna