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Communicative Transactions

In Chapter 3 I discussed the establishment of good communicative transactions as being fundamental to the informing of users for consent requests. However, an astute reader may have noticed that I mostly focussed on the information transfer from the vendor or developer to the user, with the sole immediate feedback transfer of information being the simple consent decision of the user. It could be argued that there needs to be more here; that users should be able to negotiate the conditions of the agreement, or similar. There are a few problems with this idea, however, particularly as it pertains to End User License Agreements.

For a user to be able to negotiate something like an EULA, in a similar way to negotiation of other legal contracts, such as a rental agreement, it would require a human representative of the company or developer involved to be present for negotiation. With technology as it currently is, there's no real automatic technical way to deal with this sort of problem. Such a negotiation option would be costly to companies, who might need to hire someone around the clock to deal with international issues, and who could lose business due to the lack of instant gratification the user would have if they needed to wait for negotiation.

Simply put, the point of the enhanced communication transaction discussion in Chapter 3 is that the basic ``full disclosure'' methods currently in place are not sufficient for informed consent, and that they, in fact, often impair the decision-making procedure. What needs to happen is a shift of the responsibility for the distillation of information from the user back to the consent-requester, who should aim to make the disclosure more targeted to the needs and expectations of the user. Changing the disclosure model to deal with users on a more personal level is a vast improvement over the current methods used for informing users. However, it is not an ideal solution, like the on-call face-to-face negotiation suggested above. Negotiating face-to-face in this manner would make for similar interactions as those in the medical and clinical research fields, which could make the methods used successfully in those areas translate better to information technology than they do now. There is the possible problem that the consent-requesters in IT situations really would want people to consent, and would dissuade them from challenging parts of the license to cover their own legal bases, but since face-to-face negotiations are unlikely to come to pass, there is little point speculating. All we can do with the technology at hand is make it as easy as possible for users to take in (through reading or associating images with concepts, such as the recommendations of Chapter 4), understand, and then make a decision in a way that is as informed as the technology will allow. It is all very well to look at ideal situations, but when the industry needs real solutions that work in the current technological climate, we, as applied philosophers, have to make the best of what we have available to us.

Thus I see the problem of an equally weighted communication transaction as something future technology could potentially fix, but to postpone improving informed consent procedures until then would be unacceptable.


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Catherine Flick 2010-02-03