Defence Against the (Digital) Dark Arts: Defining, Detecting and Measuring Unlawful Dark Patterns in the EU

Published a conference abstract Defence Against the (Digital) Dark Arts: Defining, Detecting and Measuring Unlawful Dark Patterns in the EU with Constanta Rosca, Bogdan Covrig, Catalina Goanta, Jerry Spanakis and Gunes Acar for the 5th Workshop on Technology and Consumer Protection (ConPro ’21).

The proposal says that the use of dark patterns on shopping websites to influence consumers’ transactional decisions raises concerns relating to the fairness of commerce. In the EU, the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive aims to protect consumers from unfair commercial practices employed by traders. However, the relative newness and the scale at which dark patterns are being deployed may impede consumer protection authorities’ efforts to enforce the law. Building on the research by Mathur et al., the main aim of this project is to explore ways to automatically measure trader compliance with the two legal instruments identified above using Data Mining and Natural Language Processing techniques.

https://www.ieee-security.org/TC/SPW2021/ConPro/papers/rosca-conpro21.pdf