18 - Consumer Contracting in the Smartphone Era

Summary

More than most innovations, smartphones have transformed the human experience. Most people now live with powerful computational devices within arm’s reach, day and night. By enabling the platform economy and bringing computers closer to the human experience, smartphones also opened new doors for tracking and surveillance. The sum of these changes radically altered the consumer contracting environment, exerting new pressures on the foundations of contract law. This chapter examines key factors in this transformation: unprecedented scale, privacy risks, linguistic complexity, and fundamental asymmetries. In sum, the smartphone era has exacerbated old conundrums in consumer contracting – while also introducing new ones. The net result: a further decoupling of consumer reality and contract law.