EU ANTITRUST: HOT TOPICS & NEXT STEPS

Prague, Czechia

EU ANTITRUST: HOT TOPICS & NEXT STEPS 2022

data we collect and learn from you and others (including any data with special protections you choose to provide where you have given your explicit consent); how you use and interact with our Products; and the people, places, or things you’re connected to and interested in on and off our Products (Facebook, no date). Self-determination is however an issue that may depend on peoples’ perception of the level of privacy they wish to protect and these differ amongst individuals. Some are happy to give their data up without further questioning, some will avoid using a dominant platform in the first place. What is more, privacy self management for consumers is limited to few meaningful options (Zuboff, 2015, p. 83, see also Zuboff, 2019). However, even given the choice between a more or less personalized Facebook profile which denotes being able to control the amount of data revealed to Facebook, consumers may struggle as they are in fact only informed what data they are giving away to Facebook in its privacy policy, however, they are not informed how this information is going to be used later on. Self-determination is also impaired where consumers are not giving away data for specific purpose but to access some service overall. A dominant platform can be perceived as an ‘essential facility’ that consumers consider indispensable to communicate with their friends etc. It may also be difficult for Facebook’s or Google’s competitors to face the first mover advantages, the amount of data gathered, the quality of service that these provide. Self-determination is also impaired due to non-transparent terms and conditions that serve valid consent to data gathering, accompanied with non-transparent- explanations of the further path of consumers data or at least possible options. This is so as transparency is typically discussed in an unquestioning manner: it is not treated as problematic that giant corporations, such as Google and Facebook, are far from being transparent (Ruckenstein and Pantzar, 2017, p. 406). The idea of consent derives from the German introduction of informational self determination and denotes that citizens are able to participate in the processing of their personal information. This empowerment of users is supposed to come from allowing them to consent (van Alsenoy, Kosta and Dumortier, 2014, p. 188). Consent is, among other justifications for the processing of data, one that is used most often by online services but it does not really denote the pure right to information self-determination it originally derives from (ibid.). Nowadays, it is very much used as a shield for the companies to protect themselves from legal actions that may follow the use of data. Moreover, consent also gives the impression of some kind of ‘intrinsic force’, however it does not in fact denote that the processing is in itself legitimate (ibid.).

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