Fairness starts before the click

You open an app to answer one message. Twenty minutes later, you are still there.
A video starts playing before you choose it. The next one follows automatically.
A notification appears just as you are about to leave.
Cancelling a subscription takes six steps. Signing up took one.

We often blame these experiences on bad habits, weak self-control or poor digital literacy. That lets the companies designing them off the hook. The truth is that many digital services are built to keep us watching, clicking, buying and sharing data. They test colours, wording, timing, rankings and notifications to see what hooks us most. They learn when we hesitate, when we are tired and what makes us stay. The resulting pressure is rarely accidental: it is the business model. In 2019, EU consumer authorities made Booking.com change practices including misleading scarcity claims, discounts and rankings^[1]. Those messages telling us that a room is almost sold out are a reminder that interface design can manufacture urgency and push us toward a choice we might not otherwise have made.

This is why digital fairness cannot begin and end with the final click. By the time people press ‘accept’, ‘buy’ or ‘continue’, the service may already have shaped the options, concealed the alternatives and created the urgency.

The usual language of consumer choice assumes a roughly equal encounter between a company and an informed individual. Online, that assumption collapses. The company has the data, the designers, the behavioural research and the power to adjust the environment in real time. What do we have? A small screen, limited time and no access to the logic shaping what we see.

A fair digital environment cannot – and should not – depend on everyone being permanently alert. No one can examine every default, decode every recommendation system, or resist every strategically timed prompt. Fairness must be built into the environment itself, not left to the skills of the people using it. In practice, that means rules, not appeals: cancelling must be as easy as subscribing, protection must be the default rather than a setting, and a system that detects a moment of weakness must not be allowed to act on it.

That also changes how we think about vulnerability. Policy often treats vulnerability as a fixed characteristic of particular groups. Yet digital systems do not wait for vulnerable groups. In fact, they can create vulnerable moments and then act on them. Anyone becomes easier to influence when tired, lonely, rushed, financially stressed or overwhelmed. Someone browsing late at night, hesitating over a purchase or repeatedly returning to the same offer may be easier to influence in that moment. A digital service can detect those signals and adapt what it shows next. Of course, some people and groups face these pressures far more often, and with harsher consequences. But the wider point matters: vulnerability is shaped by design, context and power, not only by who a person is.

There is a collective dimension too. It is tempting to say that no one has to use these services. But increasingly, that is no longer true: what was once a choice is becoming an obligation, as public services, healthcare or social support require people to interact with digital systems they did not choose and cannot easily avoid. And even where the choice remains, it exists only one person at a time. One person may be able to close an app, reject a prompt or pay for a different service. A whole society cannot. It cannot simply opt out of digital systems that organise communication, work, culture and access to information.

When the same commercial incentives shape the services used by millions of people, the effects do not stay private. They quietly decide what becomes visible, what disappears, which voices travel further and which forms of behaviour come to seem normal. Digital fairness therefore concerns how we live together, not only the quality of individual transactions.

For me, the promise of digital fairness is not better self-defence, but less need for it: it is a society that places limits on how companies may influence us. Self-determination should not mean another dashboard full of settings. It should mean that cancelling takes as many steps as signing up: one. It should mean being able to use a service without every hesitation becoming a signal, every pause becoming a cue to intervene and every moment of weakness becoming commercially useful. It should mean that refusing profiling or constant engagement is not punished with a worse service or social exclusion.

The debate goes beyond a few irritating interfaces. Design choices shape which prices people see, which opportunities reach them at all and how difficult it becomes to leave. What is at stake is not convenience but access to information, equality, data protection and participation. These are questions of power, even when they appear as ordinary product decisions.

That means better design alone will never be enough. Companies may improve a button while keeping the same objective behind it: collect more data, hold attention for longer and make exit less likely. A fairer interface can still sit on top of an unfair system. The real test is what a service is optimising for, who benefits when it works and who bears the cost. Otherwise, ‘user-friendly’ can become another word for frictionless extraction. And friction is sometimes exactly what protects us.

Europe increasingly talks about reducing technological dependencies. That matters, as long as we frame it correctly. Because origin is a poor proxy for fairness: replacing a foreign platform with an EU one achieves little if the new service relies on the same extraction, profiling and behavioural pressure. Any serious project of digital self-determination must therefore ask more than who owns the technology, it must ask which business model it serves, who can shape it and what limits apply to its power. Without digital fairness, sovereignty risks becoming a change of supplier rather than a change in power.

A fair digital future should not demand that every person becomes an expert in seeing through manipulation but should make manipulative design a bad business strategy.

^[1]Autoriteit Consument & Markt (ACM): Booking.com Commits to Adjusting Its Website Following Action by European Consumer Authorities, 2019, https://www.acm.nl/en/publications/bookingcom-commits-adjusting-its-website-following-action-european-consumer-authorities