The seven deadly sins of the 2010s: No, not pride, sloth, etc. The seven UI 'dark patterns' that trick you into buying stuff

xxlauzyxx · 6/26/2019 2:38 AM EST

Click For Photo: https://regmedia.co.uk/2019/06/25/shutterstock_1336718669.jpg

https://twitter.com/random_walker/status/1143608438062272519

Not all dark patterns are illegal, but they are nonetheless problematic because they are intended to prey on our cognitive limitations and weaknesses. In our paper we mapped each pattern to the corresponding cognitive bias from the psychology literature. pic.twitter.com/rF03QiNTJC
— Arvind Narayanan (@random_walker) June 25, 2019

Dark patterns – user interfaces designed to deviously manipulate people into doing things – have become common enough on websites and in apps that almost two dozen providers have sprung up to supply behavior persuasion as a service.

And in some cases, these firms openly advertise deceptive marketing techniques, describing ways to generate fake product orders and social messages celebrating those fake orders.

Finding - Computer - Science - Boffins - Arunesh

This finding is one of several from seven computer science boffins – Arunesh Mathur, Gunes Acar, Michael Friedman, Elena Lucherini, Jonathan Mayer, Marshini Chetty, and Arvind Narayanan – all from Princeton University in the USA, except for Chetty, who hails from the University of Chicago.

On Tuesday, the meticulous seven published a draft research paper, Dark Patterns at Scale: Findings from a Crawl of 11K Shopping Websites, that explores the prevalence of interface-driven influencing techniques.

Third-parties - Patterns - Service - Arvind - Narayanan

"We found 22 third-parties that offer 'dark patterns as a service,'" said Arvind Narayanan, a professor at Princeton. "The psychology research behind nudges has been weaponized."

The researchers analyzed the top 11,000 websites, as ranked by Amazon's Alexa service, using a custom crawler that visits e-commerce sites and completes the click flow to purchase products, then saves the interfaces encountered and interactions for analysis.

Boffins - Dark - Patterns - Types - Shopping

The boffins found 1,841 dark patterns, representing 15 distinct types, on 1,267 of those 11,000 shopping websites – that represents about 11.2 per cent of the data set. And they propose seven categories for such user-interface tricks:

Sneaking

Actions - Information - Users

Attempting to misrepresent user actions, or delay information that if made available to users, they would likely object to.

Urgency

Deadline - Sale

Imposing a deadline on a sale or...

(Excerpt) Read more at: www.theregister.co.uk

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