Daniele Archibugi, Natalia Tosoni
Our paper explores the potential dangers associated with ratings. While it may help consumers and users to reduce information asymmetries, rating systems can be easily abused. It will be easy to merge information collected for different purposes, to provide an “overall rating” for individuals. But this will generate an unexperienced surveillance system incompatible with liberal values.
Thanks to digital technologies and Web 2.0, people now have the power to share their opinions regarding products and services purchased with a larger-than-ever online community. Websites, such as Amazon or Tripadvisor, allow broader world-of-mouth among consumers that helps to reduce the typical existing information asymmetries between consumers and producers; users and service providers; and citizens and public administrators. This has enhanced the effectiveness of the “voice” evoked by Albert O. Hirschman in the 1970s, giving more power to consumers, users and citizens vis-à-vis their counterparts. However, there are also strong risks associated with inappropriate use of feedback. Perhaps these risks are less important than “hate speech” whose effects have been multiplied by social networks up to the point at which increased forms of regulations and policing are necessarily taking place. In our research we have tried to identify the more subtle dangers associated with online complains, protests and comments.
Can users’ digital feedback become too invasive, so much so as to constitute a concrete threat to individual privacy and respect? What if the feedback data are used by governments to control individuals and limit their rights? Not all feedback is carrying equal weight or risk. It is one thing is to comment on the defects of a washing machine purchased online but another thing to leave an offensive message about an Uber driver. For these reasons it is crucial to recognize the underlying power dynamics associated with users’ feedback. Thus, understanding the power dynamics of feedback is a central need today. We distinguish three different types of feedback.
The first one is bottom-up feedback, when people can express themselves on products and services for the benefit of other potential users. As suggested by Hirschman, the organizations can also benefit from the comments since it may help them to improve what they offer and so potentially meet the expectations of customers and users before they embrace their competitors. The power ratio is contentious and depends on the ability and willingness of the organization to react and adjust positively to the demands of the public.
We call the second one transversal feedback. Thishappens when a series of individuals, in the same hierarchical position, exchange comments, appreciations and reciprocal evaluations. In this category, each player has the same power. There are many risks in this case, but they belong to the same category as is often analysed when dealing with online hate speech.
The last and most dangerous is when the feedback develops a top-down dynamic. No longer does the individual appraise the organization. On the contrary powerful organizations assign and classify individuals according to their own rating on the ground of specific standards and indicators. This type is rarely accepted in political systems (the trials of the Chinese Social Credit Systems being an exception) but it occurs frequently in economic life: banks classify consumers according to their credit ratings, insurance companies assign motorists to groups, air-companies divide travellers into premium and standard passengers, employers have their own evaluation of their workers. With modern ICTs it will be very easy to combine such top-down feedback into a single “digital identity card”. This could easily generate forms of surveillance and discrimination which might lead society into a worse Orwellian nightmare. For these reasons, these data should be duly monitored both when they are collected and when they are used.
It is essential to recognise and separate the helpful functions that feedback and its rating that can guarantee for the protection of consumers, users, and citizens, from those that are potentially harmful and risky. On the one hand, an adequate digital civic education should be created that favours an awareness by consumers and citizens of the new opportunities. On the other hand, the use that organizations make of the ratings of individuals should be kept under strict public control and designed to avoid becoming merged in order to create a dangerous and illiberal digital identity for individuals.
Daniele Archibugi is Professor of Innovation, Governance and Public Policy at Birkbeck, University of London, Birkbeck and Research Director at the Italian National Research Council, Irpps.
Natalia Tosoni is a Doctoral Student in Sociology at the University of Bologna.