Harmonizing and Enhancing the Enforcement of Digital Rights. The Integrated Role of Consumer Law and Data Protection Law

This article explores how the boundaries between consumer law and data protection law have increasingly become blurred in the digital economy, and considers how these bodies of law can be integrated in order to strengthen the protection of users’ rights, starting from the concept of “redress vulnerability”. The essay begins from a European law perspective, then focuses on the intersections between consumer law and data protection law in the Italian and German legal systems. It analyzes some recent judicial rulings, highlighting the need to use consumer law tools to enforce data protection rights, and vice versa. The article frames data privacy as a consumer right and discusses the advantages of collective redress for the protection of consumers’ digital rights, as well as the main challenges that aggregate litigation is likely to face in this field in the coming years.