End User Accounts of Dark Patterns as Felt Manipulation

Abstract

Manipulation defines many of our experiences as a consumer, including subtle nudges and overt advertising campaigns that seek to gain our attention and money. With the advent of digital services that can continuously optimize online experiences to favor stakeholder requirements, increasingly designers and developers make use of "dark patterns"-forms of manipulation that prey on human psychology-to encourage certain behaviors and discourage others in ways that present unequal value to the end user. In this paper, we provide an account of end user perceptions of manipulation that builds on and extends notions of dark patterns. We report on the results of a survey of users conducted in English and Mandarin Chinese (n=169), including follow-up interviews from nine survey respondents. We used a card sorting method to support thematic analysis of responses from each cultural context, identifying both qualitatively-supported insights to describe end users' felt experiences of manipulative products and a continuum of manipulation. We further support this analysis through a descriptive analysis of survey results and the presentation of examples from the interviews. We conclude with implications for future research, considerations for public policy, and guidance on how to further empower and give users autonomy in their experiences with digital services. CCS Concepts: • Security and privacy → Social aspects of security and privacy; • Human-centered computing → Empirical studies in HCI; Empirical studies in interaction design.

Who is responsible for the prolonged use of dark patterns?

“…Users, however, beyond the corporate bonds, expect the designers and developers to balance the monetary desires put forth by their clients and product stakeholders in a way that is not an adversary to the trust they put in them. Users have been feeling more like a money-making commodity than 'live' humans, but their 'forgotten' humanity also gives them a hard time pinning the full lengths of the blame for the manipulations onto the creatives [1]. The prolonged exposure that the society as a whole has felt towards such design decisions has made them used to them, considering how they must 'live with it.'…”

“…A non-exhaustive list of previous works hints towards the awareness among the users and their discussions in response to being exposed to 'manipulative malpractices' while using their everyday goto applications, both web and mobile [19,1,21,22,5,4]. Another set of recognized works portrays the disarray felt by practitioners with varying experience ranges with what their sense of responsibility holds concerning the leverages of their designs, for they are answerable to their workplace hierarchy with administration and marketing in the picture, alongside their sense of self due to personal ethical standpoints [6,11,14,8,12,3].…”

Redress for Dark Patterns Privacy Harms? A Case Study on Consent Interactions

“…We append recent publications to this collection [90] by compiling work during February and March 2022, following similar methods for identifying and filtering dark patterns work -that is, we first search the ACM Digital Library, arXiV, SSRN, and Google Scholar for 'dark patterns' work seen in academic venues or forthcoming work. However, we additionally include related papers that discuss dark patterns (thus including work like [52], which discusses user experiences of manipulation) and privacy UX papers (like [6] Hung [69] Table 1: The documents used in our dark patterns literature survey, organized by contribution type and publication date (N=44). Bolded titles refer to work that extensively or exclusively focuses on consent, opt-out, similar decision-making privacy interactions like DNSMPI, or otherwise significantly focus on privacy (N=17).…”

“…list the Maximize, Publish, Centralize, Preserve, Obscure, Deny, Violate, Fake dark strategies, then map these to specific dark patterns. In user studies, participants could be less aware of privacy harms resulting from dark patterns than of other harms, but the few who did, discussed cybersecurity threats and other harms to their privacy [15]; participants were also keenly aware and frustrated that they were being manipulated [15,52].…”

Imagining, Studying and Realising A Less Harmful App Ecosystem

“…Bongard-Blanchy et al [12] and Gray et al [31] verified through user studies that users are often not aware of the presence of dark patterns, and experience "feeling manipulated." There is often a steep power imbalance between platforms and end-users.…”