Dark and Bright Patterns in Cookie Consent Requests

Abstract

Dark patterns are (evil) design nudges that steer people's behaviour through persuasive interface design. Increasingly found in cookie consent requests, they possibly undermine principles of EU privacy law. In two preregistered online experiments we investigated the effects of three common design nudges (default, aesthetic manipulation, obstruction) on users' consent decisions and their perception of control over their personal data in these situations. In the first experiment (N = 228) we explored the effects of design nudges towards the privacy-unfriendly option (dark patterns). The experiment revealed that most participants agreed to all consent requests regardless of dark design nudges. Unexpectedly, despite generally low levels of perceived control, obstructing the privacy-friendly option led to more rather than less perceived control. In the second experiment (N = 255) we reversed the direction of the design nudges towards the privacy-friendly option, which we title "bright patterns". This time the obstruction and default nudges swayed people effectively towards the privacy-friendly option, while the result regarding perceived control stayed the same compared to Experiment 1. Overall, our findings suggest that many current implementations of cookie consent requests do not enable meaningful choices by internet users, and are thus not in line with the intention of the EU policymakers. We also explore how policymakers could address the problem.

References in corpus (2)

• Dark Patterns after the GDPR: Scraping Consent Pop-ups and Demonstrating their Influence
• Improving Privacy Protection in the area of Behavioural Targeting

Cited by in corpus (8)

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• Defending Against the Dark Arts: Recognising Dark Patterns in Social Media
• Listening to the Voices: Describing Ethical Caveats of Conversational User Interfaces According to Experts and Frequent Users
• All in one stroke? Intervention Spaces for Dark Patterns
• Is Downloading this App Consistent with my Values? Conceptualizing a Value-Centered Privacy Assistant
• Immersive Invaders: Privacy Threats from Deceptive Design in Virtual Reality Games and Applications
• A Systematic Review of User Experiments Measuring the Effects of Dark Patterns
• Cookie Banners, What's the Purpose? Analyzing Cookie Banner Text Through a Legal Lens