Consumer’s Reader: What are Dark Patterns and Why Do We Need to Know About Them - Part 1

The Consumer Reader section offers interesting and useful readings for all users. This time we decided to share more about a topic that is not sufficiently covered by the legislation and is still being studied to understand how much it is needed.

If it happened to you, you enter a site because you are looking for something, but instead of finding it right away, a large pop-up window with a cookie message appears on the screen and your only quick option is to agree with the  cookies policy, otherwise you have to read loads of information to understand how not to accept them? Annoying, isn't it. And how many free offers did you throw in, allowing them to have your data? Probably a lot, because you haven't read the text with the small letters, if there was one at all. And have you tried to terminate your account in a large trading platform or social network? The path to finding the right place with the button from which you can do it or the contact details of the department from which you need to request it can be very difficult, even undetectable.

Recently, a documentary, The Social Dilemma, has become very popular, in which professionals in the field of artificial intelligence and UX design talk about what techniques are used only to keep users on a site, network or application and to be irradiated or encouraged to spend money.

Behind all this are mechanisms that are already openly called dark patterns. We have already written about them in YOUR BIG DATA AS A CONSUMER CAN PREDICT WHAT YOU NEED, but here we expand the topic.

Definition of dark patterns

If we have to use a definition, the first one is given by UX designer Harry Brignell on his website darkpatterns.org. According to him, dark patterns are “tricks used in websites and apps that make you do things that you didn't mean to, like buying or signing up for something”. He wanted to use this site to make people realize that there is such a thing as dark patterns and thus to be vigilant to too good offers, the easy choice that the sites offer and other similar traps.

In the second part of this post in the section Consumer Reader you will read why we should talk about dark patterns. Follow it in the News of nais.bg.

Sources:

https://www.acm.nl/sites/default/files/documents/2020-02/acm-guidelines-on-the-protection-of-the-online-consumer.pdf

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2101.04843.pdf

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3472316