Eleonora Viganò will discuss her paper “The Right to be an Exception to Predictions in Recommendation Systems” at the Workshop on Ethics of Influence organized by the Uehiro Centre of Practical Philosophy of the University of Oxford.

In the contribution, the author contends that the way in which most recommendation systems (RSs) make predictions about the user’s preferences violates either the right to an open present or the right to be treated as an individual. The right to an open present requires not to treat the user as their past selves, which means that RSs should not provide the user only with content similar to that chosen in the past. As content-based and utility-based RSs predict a user’s preferences only on the basis of their past choices, they violate such a right. The right to be treated as an individual requires acknowledging that the individual can be an exception to RSs’ predictions based on data from other people with whom the user is associated. As collaborative-filtering and demographic RSs predict a user’s preferences only on the basis of their membership to a certain group, they violate this right. By combining the rights to an open present and to be treated as an individual in RSs, the author derives the right to be an exception to predictions, which states that RSs should not provide the users with recommendations based only on their past choices or similar people’s choices.