Meaningful Consent in the Digital Economy

Despite being asked to "agree" constantly to terms of service, we do not currently have "meaningful consent." It is unclear whether having simple and meaningful consent mechanisms would change business fundamentally or enhance new kinds of economics around personal data sharing. Since consent is deemed necessary and part of a social contract for fairness, however, without meaningful consent, that social contract is effectively broken and the best intent of our laws undermined. Our research challenges to address this gap are interdisciplinary: meaningful consent has implications for transforming current digital economy data practices; change will require potentially new business models, and certainly new forms of interaction to highlight policy without over burdening citizens as we go about our business. We have set out a vision to achieve an understanding of meaningful consent through a combination of interdisciplinary expert and citizen activities to deliver useful policy, business and technology guidelines.

We aim to provide a functional meaningful consent framework that will facilitate greater understanding of data protection models, enable more effective policy and legislation that will work with citizen behaviour for meaningful consent. The interdisciplinary scope of the research in this project will deliver in three key areas for impact in each; policy, technology and business.

Social Policy Impact: Policy Framework [lead, Thomas, first output year 1] will translate research insights from the involved disciplines (economics, marketing and computing & web science) into principles to inform and structure the development of future data protection, privacy and consent legislation both domestically and internationally, since there is significant data protection policy activity at the European level. Of particular interest are questions about what constitutes meaningful consent in a personal-data context, how to determine which scenarios should require meaningful consent, how to implement those requirements in policy and respond to them with technology, and how compliance with user consent can be audited and enforced.

Academic/Technology impact [lead: schraefel, first prototypes 6m in] will include prototypes and techniques as part of a framework that aids understanding and awareness on the part of citizens for meaningful consent, both in business-exchange scenarios (eg participating in corporate-owned social networks, accessing material on sites where one subscribes, etc) and more generally, where these mechanisms provide smarter and more effective ways to elicit, store and communicate consent by reducing confounding effects such as habituation and decision fatigue.

Business impact [lead: Orhaghi, first outputs, year 1] will be in the form of a better understanding of how strong meaningful consent requirements would disrupt existing business practices and how this disruption could be exploited by new business models and practices that use privacy and consent as selling points.