by Adam John Andreotta and Björn Lundgren
Andreotta, A. J., & Lundgren, B. (2024). Automated informed consent. Big Data & Society, 11(4). https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517241289439
If you are an average internet user, you probably experience prompts for consent daily. For example, you may have been asked, via a pop-up window, whether you would like to accept all cookies, or only those necessary to function on a website you have visited. While it is a good thing that companies actually seek your consent, repeated requests cause so much annoyance that many of us become complacent about the content of the agreement. No one really has the time to read and accept every privacy policy that applies to them online.
One solution to this problem that has emerged in the last few years is so-called “automated consent.” The idea is that software could learn what your privacy preferences are, and then do all the consenting for you. The idea is promising, but there are technical, legal, and ethical issues associated with it. In the paper, we deal with some of the ethical issues around automated consent. We start by articulating three different versions of automated consent: a reject-all option, a semi-automated option, and a fully automated option, which can feature AI and machine learning. Regardless of which version is used, we argue that a series of normative issues need to be wrestled with before wide scale adoption of the technology. These include concerns about whether automated consent would prohibit peoples’ ability to give informed consent; whether automated consent might negatively impact people’s online competencies; whether the personal data collection required for automated consent to function raises new privacy concerns; whether automated consent might undermine market models; and how responsibility and accountability might be impacted by automated consent. Of course, there is much to be said regarding the legal implications of the technology itself, and we invite legal scholars and computer scientists to explore the regulatory implications and technological options related to automated consent in our discussion.
