Speak Up! Legal Challenges in the Light of the Determination of Emotion in Conducting Targeted Advertising through a Voice Recognition Device

Abstract

Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology keeps on being developed and has started to emerge into some devices and/or machines. AI can be embedded in many forms, and one of them is voice recognition technology. This technology that offered a human-like interactive feature has featured such as in iPhone Siri and Amazon Alexa. The rising trend of this technology also showed when Amazon has been granted a new patent regarding its virtual assistant, Alexa, in 2018. According to the patent, the device will automatically infer the user’s voice to determine their emotion in order to generate targeted advertisements. This patent hence posed a risk of harming the user’s autonomy since the user is unable to leave their emotions to go undetected by the device. Therefore, the commodification of emotion could challenge the adequacy of the current legal regimes, in particular, data protection and consumer laws since both have the primary concern to protect the autonomy and dignity of consumers. This research aimed to analyse whether the current European data protection and consumer laws are adequate to mitigate the risks posed by the commodification of emotion to conduct targeted advertising in the voice recognition technology.