The rapid advance of AI systems requires new shared guideposts for consumer protection.
Consumers today find themselves increasingly vulnerable in a digital landscape that offers tremendous convenience while simultaneously eroding their autonomy. The patchwork of existing privacy protections has created dangerous gaps that leave individuals exposed to exploitation as companies and bad actors leverage artificial intelligence (AI) in novel and unexpected ways.
In this fragmented privacy landscape, consumer data flows freely to third parties whose interests often diverge sharply from consumers’ own interests. Consumers have also found that their natural inclinations toward convenience and connection have left them vulnerable to manipulation through endless subscription traps and platform lock-in effects. Although the challenges and threats to consumer sovereignty multiply, effective remedies remain scarce.
This moment echoes previous technological inflection points in American history. Just as President John F. Kennedy responded to the rapid economic and technological changes of the 1960s with his groundbreaking Consumer Bill of Rights, our era demands a similar recalibration of consumer protections. The bipartisan tradition of updating these safeguards reflects a fundamental understanding—a truly prosperous economy must serve both business and consumer interests. Without addressing widespread concerns about new technologies, we risk impeding the very innovations that could enhance our lives.
AI agents represent a transformative leap in technological capability—they are autonomous digital entities that can perceive, reason, and act on behalf of users. Unlike AI assistants that follow fixed rules, AI agents learn and adapt through interaction and can make independent decisions that profoundly impact our lives. Consider an AI agent that manages your calendar, communicates with other services, and makes decisions about sharing your availability. While convenient, this agent accumulates intimate knowledge of your routines, relationships, and preferences.
The privacy implications of AI agents extend far beyond traditional data collection concerns. These systems operate as perpetual observers and interpreters of human behavior, creating detailed psychological profiles that can predict—and potentially influence—future actions. Imagine an AI agent that not only tracks your purchases but learns to recognize patterns of emotional vulnerability, timing product recommendations for moments when you are most likely to make impulsive decisions. Ben and Jerry’s at your door when you break up with a partner. Splurge clothing purchases after a rough day at work. And so on.
The “black box” nature of AI agents presents another set of privacy concerns. Their decision-making processes, built on complex, self-adjusting algorithms, often remain inscrutable even to their developers. This opacity becomes especially concerning when agents share information with other AI systems. For instance, your AI agent fitness coach might seem harmless in isolation, but when it communicates with other AI systems it could contribute to a comprehensive profile used for healthcare decisions or insurance pricing.
The surveillance capabilities enabled by networks of AI agents represent a quantum leap beyond traditional data collection. Through real-time processing and cross-referencing of vast datasets, these systems can track behavior with unprecedented granularity. A home automation agent might combine voice recognition, movement patterns, and device usage to infer everything about your emotional state and personal relationships. This deduction creates a level of surveillance that would have been unimaginable just years ago.
The incentive structures surrounding AI development further compound these risks. The insatiable appetite for training data encourages aggressive collection practices, while the complexity of AI ecosystems creates new vulnerabilities through third-party interactions. An AI agent designed to protect your privacy might inadvertently expose sensitive information through its interactions with other systems, each operating with its own objectives and standards.
A comprehensive set of consumer rights specifically tailored to the AI era may address these novel challenges. Importantly, these rights place significant responsibilities and duties on institutions that develop and deploy AI systems for consumers. There is no liberty in a privacy regime that expects consumers to spend hours reading privacy policies and to constantly update their privacy settings on an app-by-app basis. These potential rights include:
- The Right to One and Done Privacy Settings addresses the cognitive burden of managing countless individual privacy settings. This right would enable consumers to establish platform-level privacy preferences that automatically apply to all applications, which would create a consistent and manageable approach to data protection. Imagine, for example, that upon buying your phone you would receive a prompt to establish data sharing rules and notification settings that would apply across all of your apps, including apps incorporating AI. This drastically easier approach could prevent consumers from falling victim to privacy fatigue brought on by closely analyzing every app.
- The Right to Recognize responds to the increasing sophistication of AI interactions by mandating clear disclosure of whether an entity is human or artificial. This transparency becomes crucial as AI agents become more adept at mimicking human communication. Transparency also ensures that consumers can make informed choices about their interactions.
- The Right to Real Consequences requires clear articulation of potential risks and outcomes associated with AI systems. Companies must provide concrete scenarios illustrating where consumer data might end up and what risks such distribution entails facilitating truly informed consent. In short, consumers should have a vivid understanding of possible uses of their data. This framing would go a lot further toward educating consumers and empowering them to make informed decisions than expecting them to understand a bunch of boilerplate privacy policies. For example, consumers may alter their privacy settings if they are aware of the possibility of government agencies purchasing their data from data brokers that the app may sell user data to.
- The Right to Leave ensures data portability and erasure capabilities, preventing platform lock-in through data captivity. This right acknowledges that meaningful consumer choice requires the ability to transfer or delete personal information without undue burden.
- The Right to Restrictions empowers consumers to place explicit limitations on their AI agents, maintaining human agency in automated systems. This control becomes increasingly crucial as AI agents take on more autonomous decision-making roles. Consumers should have means to place clear budgetary restrictions on their agents and prohibit agents from making certain agreements without first receiving explicit consumer consent.
- The Right to Remedy establishes clear liability frameworks and eliminates forced arbitration clauses, ensuring consumers have meaningful recourse when their rights are violated. This accountability mechanism is essential for enforcing other consumer protections.
- The Right to Represent enables consumers to designate AI agents as their proxies while requiring companies to implement robust verification systems, balancing convenience with security. Although this right may seem to conflict with the tenor of others on the list, it is important that consumers can shield themselves from privacy harms while making the most of the potential of AI agents to drastically improve their well-being. Differently abled individuals may benefit from AI agents that have greater ease navigating online spaces. Without a right to represent, such positive use cases may go unrealized.
- The Right to Digital Liberty recognizes that effective navigation of AI risks requires both tools and understanding. This right mandates support for digital literacy and education initiative to ensure that consumers can meaningfully exercise their other rights. Although similar proposals have been brainstormed since the dawn of the internet, this right would ideally take a page from the policy playbooks of Denmark and Singapore. Adults in those countries have ready access to substantive retraining and upskilling programs. Proficiency in AI tools should not be confined to the coastal cities and young people. A right to digital liberty would necessitate a transformation of our community colleges and other local institutions into centers of AI literacy.
The framework outlined above represents not an endpoint but a beginning. The rapid evolution of AI technology demands ongoing vigilance and adaptation in our approach to consumer protection. Legal scholars must examine and refine these proposed rights so that they can withstand judicial scrutiny while remaining flexible enough to address emerging challenges. Privacy experts must help develop technical standards that make these rights practically implementable.
Civil society organizations have a crucial role to play in advocating these protections and ensuring they serve all communities equitably. The history of consumer protection in America teaches us that rights without advocates often remain unrealized. We need engaged citizens and organizations to monitor implementation, document violations, and push for enforcement.
Most importantly, we need a broad public dialogue about the role of AI agents in our society. The decisions we make today about consumer rights in the AI age will shape the relationship between technology and human autonomy for generations to come. The time for action is now—while we can still ensure that AI agents serve as tools for human empowerment rather than instruments of exploitation.
