Dark Patterns at Scale: Findings from a Crawl of 11K Shopping Websites

Accepted at ACM CSCW 2019

Dark patterns are user interface design choices that benefit an online service by coercing, steering, or deceiving users into making unintended and potentially harmful decisions. We conducted a large-scale study, analyzing ~53K product pages from ~11K shopping websites to characterize and quantify the prevalence of dark patterns.

(final version)