Suchergebnisse

This paper gives an overview of three important aspects of consumer protection in the process of adjustment to the standards and norms of the European Union (EU): aspects concerning legislation and implementation, and, last but not least, the aspect of consumer representation. On the basis of experiences of accession countries (Hungary, Slovakia and Bulgaria) in their alignment with European Community (EC) consumer protection, this paper recalls the initial lack of any reliable tradition, also pointing out, however, the significant results made in this sector in the future Member States of the European Union. The main rationale is that, like in most of the accession and candidate countries, the law on consumer protection in Croatia represents only the starting point in the achievement of high standards of protection of consumer health and safety.

The obvious issue of consumer data in the context of consumer policy is the mass of data that consumers voluntarily or involuntarily produce and diffuse. Thereby, consumers run the risk that their data is not only being used to their benefit, but also being abused. This is particularly the case with personal and sensitive data that can clearly lead to serious harm for consumers, if this data falls into the wrong hands. Typically, in an open market economy there are commercial interests, seeking new, technical ways to access consumer data for the sake of profit maximisation. The contributions to this part show that this is an important field to be addressed by consumer policy.

The 'scored consumer' is just one example of many generic developments in and around big data, entailing potential conflicts with the fundamental right to privacy. In this paper, we will discuss the relation between elements of the big data debate and the issue of privacy, and we will exemplify the challenges arising by looking into the details of credit scoring. The current challenges originate predominantly from socio-technical developments during recent decades, which will continue to unfold over the coming years. Three of these socio-technical and techno-economic-driven developments are digitisation, big data and the Internet of things. These developments are very relevant to all of us, as they are supposed to change - and have already changed - our lives profoundly.

Dieses Thesenpapier fasst die Ergebnisse der Vorträge und der Diskussion im Rahmen des 10. NRW-Workshops Verbraucherforschung aus Sicht der Veranstalter zusammen. Der Workshop fand am Montag, den 10. Juli 2017 im Heinrich-Heine-Institut in Düsseldorf statt. Die Dokumentation des Workshops ist auf unserer Webseite unter der Rubrik "Vernetzen > NRW-Workshops" zu finden (www.verbraucherforschung.nrw/vernetzen/).

"Consumer Policy and European Union Politics" published on by Oxford University Press.