Dara Calleary (Mayo, Fianna Fail)
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In my capacity as Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment, I can speak to addictive interface designs, a deceptive practice used by online traders and a topic that has come to the fore in relation to consumer protection issues.

The EU Commission carried out a Digital Fitness Check, details of which have been recently published. The Fitness Check was carried out in response to concerns about the lack of digital fairness for consumers and to analyse if additional legislation or indeed other actions were needed to ensure equal fairness for consumers both on and offline.

The Fitness Check covers three Directives which between them represent the central elements of consumer protection law and they are:

• Unfair Commercial Practices Directive
• Consumer Rights Directive, and
• Unfair Contract Terms Directive

The Fitness Check shows the prevalence of deceptive practices that consumers face on a daily basis in their interactions online. They include difficulties with cancelling subscriptions, challenges with influencer marketing, the use of dark patterns and addictive interface designs. The latter occurs when platforms use persuasive design strategies to keep users engaged and addicted. Features such as likes on posts, images, stickers, endless scrolling and rewards are used. Young people, while often referred to as “digital natives” are most vulnerable to addictive type technologies.

The EU has put a substantial body of legislation in place designed to regulate the single market for digital products and services to protect consumers over the past 2 years. This includes the Digital Services Act, the Digital Markets Act, the Cybersecurity Act, the Data Act and the AI Act.

The protections for consumers provided for in these Acts are very broad and span safety, privacy, fairness and concentration of market power. The new legislation needs now to be bedded in, for public and private actors to become experienced with its implementation and to observe its operation in practice.

I welcome the findings of the Digital Fitness Check and they come at an opportune time, when we can observe both how this new legislation beds in and what gaps remain.

A priority of the new Commission will centre around Digital Fairness and my Department anticipates that the next Consumer Agenda, when published will contain measures to address these concerns and we will continue to participate fully in all negotiations relating to consumer protection.