Nataliia Bielova

Deceptive and coercive design practices are increasingly used by companies to extract profit, harvest data, and limit consumer choice. Dark patterns represent the most common contemporary amalgamation of these problematic practices, connecting designers, technologists, scholars, regulators, and legal professionals in transdisciplinary dialogue. However, a lack of universally accepted definitions across the academic, legislative, practitioner, and regulatory space has likely limited the impact that scholarship on dark patterns might have in supporting sanctions and evolved design practices. In this paper, we seek to support the development of a shared language of dark patterns, harmonizing ten existing regulatory and academic taxonomies of dark patterns and proposing a three-level ontology with standardized definitions for 64 synthesized dark pattern types across low-, meso-, and high-level patterns. We illustrate how this ontology can support translational research and regulatory action, including transdisciplinary pathways to extend our initial types through new empirical work across application and technology domains.

Deceptive, manipulative, and coercive practices are deeply embedded in our digital experiences, impacting our ability to make informed choices and undermining our agency and autonomy. These design practices—collectively known as “dark patterns” or “deceptive patterns”—are increasingly under legal scrutiny and sanctions, largely due to the efforts of human-computer interaction scholars that have conducted pioneering research relating to dark patterns types, definitions, and harms. In this workshop, we continue building this scholarly community with a focus on organizing for action. Our aims include: (i) building capacity around specific research questions relating to methodologies for detection; (ii) characterization of harms; and (iii) creating effective countermeasures. Through the outcomes of the workshop, we will connect our scholarship to the legal, design, and regulatory communities to inform further legislative and legal action.

Deceptive design practices are increasingly used by companies to extract profit, harvest data, and limit consumer choice. Dark patterns represent the most common contemporary amalgamation of these problematic practices, connecting designers, technologists, scholars, regulators, and legal professionals in transdisciplinary dialogue. However, a lack of universally accepted definitions across the academic, legislative and regulatory space has likely limited the impact that scholarship on dark patterns might have in supporting sanctions and evolved design practices. In this late breaking work, we seek to harmonize regulatory and academic taxonomies of dark patterns, proposing a preliminary three-level ontology to create a shared language that supports translational research and regulatory action. We identify potential directions for scholarship and social impact building upon this ontology.

A preliminary, much shorter version of this paper appears in the Proceedings of NordSec’09 [6]. Runtime enforcement is a common mechanism for ensuring that program executions adhere to constraints specified by a security policy. It is based on two si