EnfTech update: capacity building, AI and new tools in NZ and Peru
Since the release of our EnfTech report in January this year, the potentially transformative power of EnfTech is being tested out in numerous authorities across the world.
AI and consumer enforcement:
Both the EnfTech report, and an upcoming chapter written by Christine Riefa and Liz Coll in The Cambridge Handbook of AI and Consumer Law considered both the disruptive damage that systems powered by artificial intelligence can do to consumers and the potential for it to be used by consumer protection agencies to tackle problems.
UNCTAD’s working group on consumer protection in e-commerce hosted webinars covering these two aspects. The first assessed risks for consumers, followed a second which focused on how enforcement agencies can respond to industry practices and harness tech to better enforce consumer law.
Raising capacity through public interest technologists:
The US Federal Trade Commission published a paper on Building Tech Capacity in Law Enforcement Agencies. The report came from the newly formed Office of Technology (OT) whose aim is to strengthen and support law enforcement investigations through better understanding and use of technology.
The report shares how OT works to help the FTC fulfil its mission and provides a pocket guide for other public bodies thinking about integrating public interest technologists into their work.
New EnfTech tool developments:
To keep one step ahead of traders and spammers who might be potentially breaking consumer law, much of the detail of authorities’ tools are kept under wraps. We can share headlines though to give a flavour of what authorities far and wide have in development:
Commerce Commission of New Zealand presented their work on automatic capture and analysis of data from traders’ websites which they developed in-house.
Peruvian Consumer Agency INDECOPI is using AI in order to monitor spam telephone calls. This way, they have proved more efficient in being able to pinpoint if companies were complying with the Peruvian law which prohibits calls without prior consent. The use of AI has enabled the agency to reduce the length of time it took to evaluate practices and expanded their reach by being able to review many more practices than was possible with ‘human only’ investigations.
EnfTech growth continues
The proliferation of tech-enabled initiatives confirms our prediction in the EnfTech report that, the march of EnfTech is becoming inevitable. There’s still a question mark over whether fighting tech fire with tech fire is the optimal approach, and this will rumble on. But for now, a tooled-up enforcement sector is a welcome addition for dealing with the challenges of upholding consumer law in a fast-moving digital market.