This day is about promoting the basic rights of all consumers, demanding that these rights are protected and respected. Furthermore, participants protest about the social injustices and market abuses. In each year it has a theme what they focus on the most. This year theme is Fairer Digital Marketplaces. It has three main points:
- Access to fair and secure internet for the over half the world that are still offline
- Action against scams and fraud
- Better general consumer protection online
This map shows the percentages of the people who are not online in each region. To tackle this problem big companies such as Google and Facebook started their own projects to give internet access to those people in areas out of the reach. They want to do it for free because the cost of it is a big problem too in poorer countries. The first point of this year’s theme has been going on for a while now, they are going in the right direction, but it takes time to reach their overall goal and we also need to help them as much as we can to make it happen faster or convincing internet providers to lower their prices to make it affordable.
According to a report which was carried out in 2017 by CIGI-Ipsos Global Survey on Internet Security and Trust. Among those who never shop online, the key reason they don’t do it is the lack of trust. People can hear bad thing about this way of shopping. For example, not getting what they ordered or getting poor quality. The packages are late or never arriving. People have problem they are not able to make online payment because of reasons like they do not have access to online payment systems or they do not have that kind of credit card. Other problem is that there is no delivery to specific locations. But then again if someone don’t get what they wanted sometimes you can’t get a refund or there are difficulties with it. Nowadays people can hack systems as well, so they can steal personal information.
On this day they want to raise awareness for this problems with online shopping, movements make recommendations how to make amends. If you want to join this celebration and support consumers rights use the #BetterDigitalWorld hastag on the social media sites.
- http://www.consumersinternational.org/what-we-do/world-consumer-rights-day/2018-making-digital-marketplaces-fairer/
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumers_International#World_Consumer_Rights_Day
- https://www.statementagency.com/blog/2016/03/the-history-of-ecommerce
- https://www.computerworld.com/article/3099168/internet/more-than-half-the-world-is-still-offline.html