Abstract

Nowadays, B2C digital interactions are increasingly based on users’ profiling, exploiting individuals’ data as tools to elaborate and deliver personalized offers for products and services. While tech-based personalization of digital contracts is often seen as an opportunity to improve consumers’ position – allowing them to benefit from tailored conditions and options –, risks related to unregulated abuse of personalization techniques are present and significant as well. The article investigates the potential of contract law to advance consumers’ protection against these «abuses of personalization» and, more in general, as tools to preserve self-determination in personalized interactions. In particular, insights are drawn from the recent amendments to the Belgian civil code, which introduced the s.c. abus de circonstances (abuse of circumstances): we observe that such provision codifies an approach that acknowledges the role of structural power (and market) disparities as a source of the diminished counterparty’s contractual autonomy, therefore promoting a critical re-evaluation of the role of the provisions regulating defective consent in tackling contractual exploitation in the digital market.