Abstract
Virtual assistants (VAs), like Amazon’s Alexa, Google’s Assistant, and Apple’s Siri, are on the rise. However, despite allegedly being ‘assistants’ to users, they ultimately help firms to maximise profits. With more and more tasks and leeway bestowed upon VAs, the severity as well as the extent of conflicts of interest between firms and users increase. This article builds on the common law field of fiduciary law to argue why and how regulators should address this phenomenon. First, the functions of VAs resemble established fiduciaries, namely mandataries when they perform tasks on behalf of users, and increasingly advisors whenever they provide recommendations or suggestions. Second, users grant firms deploying VAs ever more discretion over their economic, and more and more significant non-economic interests, such as their health or finances. This delegation of power renders users vulnerable to abuse of power and inadequate performance by firms deploying VAs. Moreover, neither specification or monitoring nor market forces are alternatives that can sufficiently protect users. Thus, regulation is needed, departing from the recognition of the relationship between firms deploying VAs and users as a fiduciary relationship. In the EU, this could be realised through fiduciary requirements for VAs. First and foremost, to adequately protect users from abuse of power by firms deploying VAs, the core fiduciary duty of loyalty should be converted into corresponding fiduciary requirements for VAs, obliging firms to align VAs with their users.
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Notes
This article is only concerned with usage by individuals, not businesses.
The term ‘interests’ is understood broadly to cover anything firms or users may want.
For instance, one of the Google Assistant criteria for choosing a provider is their partnership with Google. The firm admits this, although very cautiously: ‘In limited circumstances, some providers may be ranked higher due to their partnership with Google in order to give high-quality results to users.’ (Google, n.d.-d).
Directive 2014/65/EU on markets in financial instruments (2014) Article 24(1) (‘Member States shall require that, when providing investment services or, where appropriate, ancillary services to clients, an investment firm act honestly, fairly and professionally in accordance with the best interests of its clients (…).’ highlights by the author).
Directive 2016/97/EU on insurance distribution (2016) Article 17(1) (‘Member States shall ensure that, when carrying out insurance distribution, insurance distributors always act honestly, fairly and professionally in accordance with the best interests of their customers.’ highlights by the author).
Shareholder Rights Directive (2017), for example, Recital 35 (‘In particular, in order to prevent the circumvention of the requirements laid down by this Directive by the firm, to avoid any conflicts of interests and to ensure loyalty of the directors to the firm, it is necessary to provide for the disclosure and the publication of the remuneration awarded or due to individual directors not only from the firm itself, but also from any undertaking belonging to the same group. (…)’ highlights by the author).
Such as the European Commission’s Green Paper on Retail Financial Services in the Single Market (2007) Number 33 (‘(…) Specific attention is granted to retail clients for which a specific regime has been established, which entails reinforced fiduciary duties upon the firm. (…)’ highlights by the author).
Article 11(10) (‘the provider offering services to data subjects shall act in the data subjects’ best interest when facilitating the exercise of their rights, in particular by advising data subjects on potential data uses and standard terms and conditions attached to such uses’ highlights by the author) and corresponding Recital 26 (‘(…) Data sharing providers that intermediate the exchange of data between individuals as data holders and legal persons should, in addition, bear fiduciary duty towards the individuals, to ensure that they act in the best interest of the data holders.’ highlights by the author).
In common law jurisdictions, courts and not legislators are the main authority developing the law. This especially holds for equity which fiduciary law is part of. Scholars engage in active discourse with courts about legal concepts.
This term, adopted from Miller (2011, p. 262), is considered a more common synonym for ‘vital’ and ‘substantial’ (see Dictionary.com, n.d.).
§§ 1002 Allgemeines Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch and following.
Articles 1984 Code Civil and following.
§§ 662 Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch and following.
Articles 1703 Codice Civile and following.
In many countries, legal advice is a strictly protected sector (see, e.g., the German Rechtsdienstleistungsgesetz [RDG], 2008).
This article omits the duty to act in good faith since other scholars conceptualise it very differently (see, e.g., Conaglen, 2010, pp. 40–44; Finn, 1977, p. 78; Gold, 2019, pp. 390–391). It also ignores the duty not to delegate fiduciary duties because users do not have personal trust in firms deploying VAs.
The terms ‘factors’ and ‘weights’ as used in this article are distinct from, but may overlap with, the so-called ‘features’ and ‘weights’ of artificial neural networks, the kind of machine learning algorithms employed in VAs (see, e.g., Siri Team, 2017).
More objections have been raised, for example, at the Law and Political Economy Project (2019), but those by Khan and Pozen (2019) are the most central and substantive.
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Acknowledgements
This article was written as a master’s thesis in law at King’s College London. I am grateful for supervision and support by Mateja Durovic, and helpful discussions with and feedback from Claire Boine, Florian Dorner, Sonder Li, Charlotte Siegmann, Risto Uuk, Anthony Aguirre, Markus Anderljung, Shubhorup Biswas, Marc Kößler, Pınar Özcan, Felicity Reddel, and Rohin Shah. All remaining errors are my own.
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Koessler, L. Fiduciary requirements for virtual assistants. Ethics Inf Technol 26, 21 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-023-09741-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-023-09741-7