I am Definitely Manipulated, Even When I am Aware of it. It s Ridiculous! -- Dark Patterns from the End-User Perspective

Abstract

Online services pervasively employ manipulative designs (i.e., dark patterns) to influence users to purchase goods and subscriptions, spend more time on-site, or mindlessly accept the harvesting of their personal data. To protect users from the lure of such designs, we asked: are users aware of the presence of dark patterns? If so, are they able to resist them? By surveying 406 individuals, we found that they are generally aware of the influence that manipulative designs can exert on their online behaviour. However, being aware does not equip users with the ability to oppose such influence. We further find that respondents, especially younger ones, often recognise the "darkness" of certain designs, but remain unsure of the actual harm they may suffer. Finally, we discuss a set of interventions (e.g., bright patterns, design frictions, training games, applications to expedite legal enforcement) in the light of our findings.

ACM DIS Conference on Designing interactive systems, June 28 - July 2, 2021, online. ACM, New York, NY, USA

References in corpus (3)

• Dark Patterns after the GDPR: Scraping Consent Pop-ups and Demonstrating their Influence
• (Un)informed Consent: Studying GDPR Consent Notices in the Field
• Dark and Bright Patterns in Cookie Consent Requests

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• Linguistic Dead-Ends and Alphabet Soup: Finding Dark Patterns in Japanese Apps
• Listening to the Voices: Describing Ethical Caveats of Conversational User Interfaces According to Experts and Frequent Users
• Deceived by Immersion: A Systematic Analysis of Deceptive Design in Extended Reality
• "It doesn't tell me anything about how my data is used'': User Perceptions of Data Collection Purposes
• Theorizing Deception: A Scoping Review of Theory in Research on Dark Patterns and Deceptive Design
• Level Up or Game Over: Exploring How Dark Patterns Shape Mobile Games
• A Comparative Study of How People With and Without ADHD Recognise and Avoid Dark Patterns on Social Media
• The Voice: Lessons on Trustworthy Conversational Agents from "Dune"
• 50 Shades of Deceptive Patterns: A Unified Taxonomy, Multimodal Detection, and Security Implications
• Immersive Invaders: Privacy Threats from Deceptive Design in Virtual Reality Games and Applications
• Access Over Deception: Fighting Deceptive Patterns through Accessibility
• Cookie Banners, What's the Purpose? Analyzing Cookie Banner Text Through a Legal Lens