The Ethics of Persuasive Technologies in Pervasive Industry Platforms: The Need for a Robust Management and Governance Framework

A growing challenge for owners, board members, executive managers, and regulators is how to regulate and manage pervasive industry platforms which use persuasive technologies. The persuasive technology community has intentionally steered clear of researching technologies used for coercion or deception. Yet, we now see different shades of persuasive technology used for coercion and deception in the market, causing problems and possibly harm to people. In this article, we will argue that the persuasive technology research community is uniquely positioned to deal with the ethical and moral challenges with pervasive industry platforms and that it has a responsibility to proactively address these challenges. We propose an interdisciplinary research approach, combining knowledge from persuasive technologies, governance, and management studies, to arrive at a framework that can provide direction for future research as well as indicate potential solutions. We introduce the reader to some of the managerial challenges with persuasive technologies used in pervasive industry platforms using an illustrative case study of Facebook and propose three future research directions.