New consent management platforms (CMPs) have been introduced to the web to conform with the EU's General Data Protection Regulation, particularly its stronger requirements for consent when companies collect and process users personal data. This work analyses the most prevalent CMP designs and measures their effect on people's consent choices. First, we scraped the designs of the five most popular CMPs on the top 10,000 websites in the UK (n=680). We found that dark patterns and implied consent are ubiquitous; only 11.7% meet the minimal requirements we set based on European law. Second, we conducted a field experiment with 40 participants to investigate how the eight most common designs affect consent rates. We found that notification style (banner or barrier) has no effect; removing the opt-out button from the first page increases consent by 22-23 percentage points; and providing more granular controls on the first page decreases consent by 8-20 percentage points. This study provides an empirical basis for the necessary regulatory action to enforce the GDPR, in particular the possibility of focusing on the centralised, third-party CMP services as an efficient way to increase compliance.
Today's users communicate via multiple apps, even when they offer almost identical functionality. We studied how and why users distribute their contacts within their app ecosystem. We found that the contacts in an app affect a user's conversations with other contacts, their communication patterns in the app, and the quality of their social relationships. Users appropriate the features and technical constraints of their apps to create idiosyncratic communication places, each with its own recursively defined membership rules, perceived purposes, and emotional connotations. Users also shift the boundaries of their communication places to accommodate changes in their contacts' behaviour, the dynamics of their relationships, and the restrictions of the technology. We argue that communication apps should support creating multiple communication places within the same app, relocating conversations across apps, and accessing functionality from other apps.
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