Prior research found that a significant portion of EU-based websites responded to the GDPR by implementing privacy dialogs that contained inadequate consent options or dark patterns nudging visitors towards accepting tracking. Less attention, so far, has been devoted to capturing the evolution of those privacy dialogs over time. We study the evolution of privacy dialogs for a period of 18 months after the GDPR became effective using screenshots from the homepages of 911 US and EU news and media websites. We assess the impact of government and third-party actions that provided additional guidance and tools for compliance on privacy dialogs' choice architecture. Over time, we observe an increase in the use of privacy dialogs providing the option to accept or reject tracking, and a reduction of nudges that encourage users to accept tracking. While the debate over the extent to which various stakeholders' responses to the GDPR meaningfully improved EU residents' privacy remains open, our results suggest that exogenous shocks (such as government interventions) may prompt websites to enact changes that bring on-the-ground implementation of the GDPR at least nominally closer to its intended goals (such as making rejecting tracking easier for visitors).
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“Okay, whatever”: An Evaluation of Cookie Consent Interfaces
Many websites have added cookie consent interfaces to meet regulatory consent requirements. While prior work has demonstrated that they often use dark patterns — design techniques that lead users to less privacy-protective options — other usability aspects of these interfaces have been less explored. This study contributes a comprehensive, two-stage usability assessment of cookie consent interfaces. We first inspected 191 consent interfaces against five dark pattern heuristics and identified design choices that may impact usability. We then conducted a 1,109-participant online between-subjects experiment exploring the usability impact of seven design parameters. Participants were exposed to one of 12 consent interface variants during a shopping task on a prototype e-commerce website and answered a survey about their experience. Our findings suggest that a fully-blocking consent interface with in-line cookie options accompanied by a persistent button enabling users to later change their consent decision best meets several design objectives.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2150217
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10392551
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- CHI '22: Proceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 27
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Robots have great potential to support people with dementia (PwD) and their caregivers. They can provide support for daily living tasks, conduct household chores, provide companionship, and deliver cognitive stimulation and training. Personalizing these robots to an individual’s abilities and preferences can help enhance the quality of support they provide, increase their usability and acceptability, and alleviate caregiver burden. However, personalization can also introduce many risks, including risks to the safety and autonomy of PwD, the potential to exacerbate social isolation, and risks of being taken advantage of due to dark patterns in robot design. In this article, we weigh the risks and benefits by drawing on empirical data garnered from the existing ecosystem of robots used for dementia caregiving. We also explore ethical considerations for developing personalized cognitively assistive robots for PwD, including how a robot can practice beneficence to PwD, where responsibility falls when harm to a PwD occurs because of a robot, and how a robot can acquire informed consent from a PwD. We propose key technical and policy concepts to help robot designers, lawmakers, and others to develop personalized robots that protect users from unintended consequences, particularly for people with cognitive impairments.more » « less
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3491102.3501985
