Work on dark patters lead by graduate student, Johanna Gunawan, and PI’s Choffnes (both at Northeastern) and Hartzog (soon moving to Boston), was cited in a European Commission final report titled, “Behavioural study on unfair commercial practices in the digital environment : dark patterns and manipulative personalisation”.
This work examines how dark patterns vary across modalities, in particular mobile applications, mobile browsers, and web browser versions of 105 popular services, such as but not limited to Facebook, Spotify, and Wish. Findings show that mobile modalities contain the most dark patterns for 85% of the services examined, but that the differences between modalities vary greatly according to dark pattern type and other traits.
In addition to being cited by the Directorate-General for Justice and Consumers (European Commission), this work was also presented at the FTC’s “Bringing Dark Patterns to Light Workshop” in April 2021, additional information can be found here.
We are very excited to see the public impact that center projects are generating.