As president of national group, Iowa’s Tom Miller plans to focus on consumer protection

Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller’s New Year’s resolution for his fellow state attorneys general is to make consumer protection, including investigating “Big Tech,” their priority in the coming year.

As the recently elected president of the National Association of Attorneys General, Miller gets to choose an area of emphasis for 2022.

Consumer protection, he said, is a “really unifying set of initiatives” for attorneys general because the practices he wants to target affect consumers throughout the nation.

He’s calling the initiative Consumer Protection 2.0: Tech Threats and Tools, but plans to address consumer protection issues broadly.

“We want to focus on a better and quicker early warning system for consumers on the basic fundamental frauds,” such as Social Security and IRS fraud and utility shut-offs, Miller told reporters on a call Thursday.

Miller, a Democrat and the longest serving attorney general in the nation’s history, also wants to bring the attorneys generals’ weight to bear on more contemporary consumer protection issues posed by social media companies, where “technology meets consumer protection.”

The algorithms used by companies, such as Facebook, Amazon and others, “have just enormous significance,” Miller said. “Algorithms can produce negative results, can produce harm, and they're not that visible.”

His investigation will be guided, in part, by the disclosures by whistleblower Frances Haugen, a former product manager at Facebook, who grew up in Iowa City.

“Facebook is just such a big set of issues,” Miller said, referring to Haugen’s disclosures during congressional testimony.

He’s particularly concerned about what he called “dark patterns” that make it difficult for consumers to sever ties with the sites. A consumer may have to click through more than a dozen steps, which Miller called “misleading.”

“If you make it all the way through there, a person comes on to try and talk you out of leaving,” he said. “They have ways to sort of pull them back in (that are) bad enough when they're doing that with adults, but to do that with kids seems to be deceptive and certainly not fair.”

In addition to the questionable use of algorithms is “dark patterns,” which Miller said makes it difficult to for a person to permanently leave a social media platform.

“We want to take a good look there … and be respectful of what's going on the investigation concerning kids and algorithms and the investigations concerning Cambridge Analytical, but maybe get to some of the fundamental issues on the algorithms and treatment dark patterns,” he said.

As part of his effort, Miller will host a summit for state attorneys general Aug. 8-10 in Des Moines — just in time for them to also attend the Iowa State Fair.

Miller, who is seeking re-election, also wants to focus on sentencing reform, which Iowa as well as other states and Congress have started to address.

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