Civil society calls for an ambitious Digital Fairness Act on World Consumer Rights Day

Civil society urges the EU to strengthen digital fairness

On 15 March, World Consumer Rights Day, EDRi and many other civil society organisations signed a coalition letter calling on the European Commission, urging them to deliver an ambitious Digital Fairness Act (DFA). The signatories stress that, altoughdigital technologies have become deeply embedded in everyday life, the online environment increasingly relies on business models built on behavioural manipulation, information asymmetries and data extraction.

The joint letter highlights that harmful online practices are no longer isolated incidents. Many services rely on design systems that steer behaviour, distort choices and exploit people’s attention and data. These systems generate financial, mental and social harms while distorting competition and eroding trust across the digital economy. Civil society organisations are therefore calling for a strong legislative response that modernises EU consumer law to address a number of pervasive business models and protects people of all ages online.

The signatories emphasise that the future DFA should modernise horizontal consumer protection rules, many of which were drafted over two decades ago, before behavioural targeting, algorithmic recommender systems and large-scale profiling became standard online practices. Updating these laws is therefore essential to ensure that they remain effective in the digital environment.

Addressing manipulative digital business models

The coalition letter focuses on several harmful practices that have become widespread across digital services. These include deceptive interface design, addictive features intended to maximise attention, unfair personalisation and exploitative influencer marketing practices. These tactics shape decisions before people even realise it, reducing their autonomy and limiting their ability to exercise their rights online.

These concerns closely align with the analysis presented in EDRi’s recent position paper “Breaking the extractive digital business model: a rights-based Digital Fairness Act” The paper explains how many digital services rely on design systems that manipulate behaviour and normalise large-scale data extraction, undermining fundamental rights such as autonomy, equality and the right to data protection.

EDRi’s analysis shows that existing EU rules only address parts of the problem. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) regulates personal data processing, while the Digital Services Act (DSA) and Digital Markets Act (DMA) address certain risks associated to platform.. However, none of these instruments impose a general duty to ensure that digital services are designed in ways that respect people’s rights and autonomy across the market.

As a result, many harmful design practices continue to operate in legally grey areas. According to EDRi’s research, systems based on profiling, behavioural influence, and engagement optimisation can undermine meaningful consent, reinforce discrimination, and weaken people’s ability to control their digital environment.

A rights-based approach to digital fairness

EDRi’s position paper proposes that the Digital Fairness Act should introduce a structural fairness duty for digital services. This would require companies to ensure that the design of interfaces, personalisation systems and optimisation models does not exploit vulnerability or manipulate behaviour. Instead of placing the burden on individuals to resist harmful design, the responsibility would shift towards companies that design and operate these systems.

The paper also calls for clear prohibitions on manipulative design practices, stronger safeguards against profiling-based personalisation, and coordinated enforcement across regulatory regimes. Effective enforcement would require cooperation between consumer protection authorities, data protection regulators and competition authorities to address digital harms that cut across multiple legal frameworks.

Importantly, a rights-based DFA should complement existing EU digital laws rather than weaken them. The DFA should reinforce the protections established under the GDPR, ePrivacy rules and other parts of the EU digital rulebook, ensuring that consumer law cannot be used to bypass stronger safeguards for fundamental rights.

Why a strong Digital Fairness Act matters

The joint civil society letter marks an important milestone in the debate on the future of digital fairness in Europe. As digital environments increasingly shape how people access information, make decisions and exercise their rights, regulators must address the structural design choices that influence behaviour at scale. By introducing clear rules against manipulative practices and ensuring strong enforcement, the DFA can help create digital markets that respect people’s rights rather than exploit them. EDRi and its partners will continue working with policymakers to ensure that the forthcoming legislation delivers meaningful protections for everyone online.