From Smart Technologies to Smart Consumer Law

This open access book critically analyses a wide range of consumer law issues generated or exacerbated by the Internet of Things.

The Internet of Things challenges many of the dichotomies which have shaped current laws: goods-services, hardware-software, tangible-intangible, online-offline. The book focuses on 4 specific challenges: things-as-service, liability, bricking of physical devices through software control, and the potential for enhanced personalisation, especially for digital assistants.

The chapters analyse specific applications such as smart homes, connected cars, and consumer wearables with a view to providing innovative solutions to the new challenges posed by the Internet of Things, and to steer the development of the Internet of Things in a fairer direction.

As well as offering an important analysis of the potential for smart consumer laws in the Internet of Things, the book also provides important insights into the growing divergence between Germany’s and the UK’s consumer laws since Brexit.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by UKRI (Arts and Humanities Research Council) and the German Research Foundation (DFG).