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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.
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Dark Patterns and the Emerging Threats of Deceptive Design Practices
Growth hacking, particularly within the spectre of surveillance capitalism, has led to the widespread use of deceptive, manipulative, and coercive design techniques in the last decade. These challenges exist at the intersection of many diferent technology professions that are rapidly evolving and “shapeshifting” their design practices to confront emerging regulation. A wide range of scholars have increasingly addressed these challenges through the label “dark patterns,” describing the content of deceptive and coercive design practices, the ubiquity of these patterns in contemporary digital systems, and the impact of emerging regulatory and legislative action on the presence of dark patterns. Building on this convergent and trans-disciplinary research area, the aims of this SIG are to: 1) Provide an opportunity for researchers and practitioners to address methodologies for detecting, characterizing, and regulating dark patterns; 2) Identify opportunities for additional empirical work to characterize and demonstrate harms related to dark patterns; and 3) Aid in convergence among HCI, design, computational, regulatory, and legal perspectives on dark patterns. These goals will enable an internationally-diverse, engaged, and impactful research community to address the threats of dark patterns on digital systems.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1909714
- PAR ID:
- 10407965
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Extended Abstracts of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA ’23)
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 4
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3544549.3583173
