Data-driven technologies undoubtedly help to improve users’ experience in the digital environment. Nonetheless, they also bring new risks and challenges. Risks related to unregulated abuse of these techniques are significant and can lead, e.g., to violations of users’ data protection and privacy, unjust discrimination based on protected grounds, manipulation of users’ decision-making, and exploitation of vulnerabilities.

In order to tackle these risks, the EU Digital Strategy aims at striking a balance between profitability from a genuinely competitive data economy and individuals’ protection. In this scenario, the European Union has adopted a set of regulations to harmonize digital intermediary services framework and to ground a safe, predictable, and trustworthy online environment. Accordingly, the recently approved Digital Services Act (DSA) establishes risk-mitigating obligations for providers of intermediary services and online platforms, such as social media and marketplaces, with a major focus on Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs) and Very Large Online Search Engines (VLOSEs).

The obligations set in the DSA are heterogeneous and involve liability rules, transparency and reporting requirements, rules on due diligence for intermediaries and online platforms for third-party contents (including a notice and take-down system), redress and audit procedures.

Whereas legislators expect that the DSA will provide a level playing field by fostering competition in online markets and, at the same time, advancing user protection in the digital environment, the current state of the art unveils significant uncertainties: the absence of effective tools for conducting the monitoring and supervision of companies’ compliance with the DSA and to assess its rules’ effectiveness in preventing the exploitation of users’ vulnerabilities create major regulatory uncertainties that can frustrate the goals of the overall digital strategy. The current lack of standardised procedures to evaluate the respect of the DSA, as well as the absence of tools to identify and extirpate the vulnerability drivers that platforms might create, is therefore a substantive obstacle in the attempt to establish an ethical, transparent, fair, explainable, and overall accountable operativity of digital platforms.

The project, participated by legal scholars aims at developing a self-assessment tool that will foster DSA compliance and the establishment of best practices within the platform market and empower users in the digital environment by increasing their awareness on risks and their protection by design and by default.