This year's Safer Internet Day took place on February 6, 2024. In this context the Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Nuclear Safety and Consumer Protection (BMUV) and Bitkom e.V. jointly held a conference. The topic of the conference was "Fit & Fair by Design - does European consumer protection need an update?".
On behalf of the BMUV, ConPolicy conducted a representative online survey with N=1,009 participants on the occasion of the conference. The aim of the survey was to investigate the perception and assessment of potentially unfair practices in the digital space and to reflect on solutions.
It can be stated that many consumers have already experienced unfair practices in the digital space. This includes, for example, impairing advertisements, behavior-based prices or methods that aim at users using services longer than intended. As a result, the practices created a feeling of discomfort and disappointed consumers' trust.
In addition, consumers have high expectations of digital offers and services and in particular want their data not to be sold. All suggestions made in the survey for future developments of digital services reached very broad approval among consumers. In particular, access to a human contact person instead of a chatbot and no unauthorized sharing of data are particularly important to consumers.
The results of the survey are published here (German). Further analyses and the survey design can be found here.
There is also an article from the Handelsblatt that, among other things, deals with the survey results and classifies them politically.