Cass Sunstein: belief

Transcript context

…Legally, is there anything we should change? I think so. I think we need a right not to be manipulated. We don’t have that. At the turn of the 20th century, roughly, people started to get exercised about violations of the right to privacy, where the right to privacy was a pretty new idea — at least the umbrella — and then it started to get specified in various ways. That was a big step forward for policy and also for legal theory, and we’re there in the world of a right to privacy. Manipulation is like that now, so no legal system has a right not to be manipulated. In Europe and the United States, there are incipient movements toward that. I think our government said publicly there should be, a right not to be manipulated about a year or two ago. How would it be specified? I think we should start with egregious cases where people are losing money or time without getting adequate clarity on that’s what’s happening to them. It might be, for example, through a hidden term which isn’t technically invisible. It’s just hard to find. The seller is getting you to buy something subject to terms and conditions which aren’t readily visible to you. That’s almost like fraud, right? There’s another way of taking care of that.…

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