“Bots, Babes and the Californication of Commerce” (2004) 1 Ottawa Law and Technology Journal 285-325.
This article was my first scholarly contribution to On the Identity Trail. The study traces the architectures of human-computer interaction back to its conceptual origins in the field of artificial intelligence as the context for studying some of the lesser known consequences of today’s automation tools and their potentially harmful effect on everyday consumers. It illustrates how artificial intelligence can be used to simulate familiarity and create the illusion of friendship, sometimes with the aim of misdirecting consumers. It also exposes various forms of surreptitious surveillance that take place in the course of automated ecommerce and demonstrates how certain human-machine interactions can be used to diminish consumers’ ability to make informed choices, thereby undermining the consent principle required by data protection and privacy law. I think that this work constitutes one of the few published attempts to link existing work on privacy and data protection with future research on the human-machine merger.
