Contract and consumer law

This chapter aims to give an overview of the contractual issues that have arisen in relation to the use of data. Since the use of data has far-reaching consequences for consumer markets, the chapter focuses on issues that have arisen in those markets and the regulatory responses that have emerged, or are emerging, in consumer law. It considers in particular what effects the use of data has on the autonomy of contracting parties and on the balance of contractual fairness, and examines three more specific issues for consumer contract law, namely transparency, payment with data, and the question whether the ‘consumer’ concept needs adjusting. The focus of this chapter is mainly on the EU, with occasional references to the US, seeing that Europe has developed a fairly coherent regime of harmonised consumer contract law that in many aspects already applies to data-related contracts.