Description
Dark patterns have become increasingly pervasive in digital environments, encompassing practices like subscription traps, hiding information about fees, pre-selecting options by default, nagging, and drip pricing. Regulators around the world have started to express concerns that such practices are causing substantial consumer detriment. Efforts to effectively regulate dark patterns face the challenge that they often operate in the grey zone between legitimate persuasion techniques and clearly illegitimate methods of influencing consumer behavior such as coercion.This paper focuses on the legal response to dark patterns in digital environments in the European Union. It discusses EU laws expressly addressing dark patterns, including the Digital Services Act, the Data Act, the new Consumer Credit Directive and the Consumer Rights Directive. The paper contends that these laws protect biased consumers and adopt autonomy as a normative lens to assess dark patterns. This normative lens is under-researched, and the existing literature has not yet produced a robust autonomy framework for regulating dark patterns.
This paper addresses this gap in research with two principle contributions. First, it works out a specific conception of autonomous decision-making that is rooted in the information paradigm. It is argued that the information paradigm holds the key for protecting consumers from dark patterns and that both the information paradigm and the provisions addressing dark patterns in EU law operate with the same underlying conception of autonomy. Second, the paper offers a novel normative classification for dark patterns in digital environments. It develops a taxonomy encompassing six categories of autonomy violations, specifically tailored for the assessment and regulation of dark patterns that exploit consumer behavioral biases. These categories uncover and make explicit the autonomy violations addressed by existing European Union legislation. They also provide policymakers in the EU and elsewhere with a framework when deliberating the regulation of other instances of dark patterns.
The six categories of autonomy violations are: (i) undermining mandated information, (ii) deception, (iii) inducing contractual agreements without reflection, (iv) negative friction, (v) non-neutral presentation of choice options, and (vi) manipulation. The paper also demonstrates how these categories apply to specific dark pattern practices in digital environments.
| Period | 17 Sept 2024 |
|---|---|
| Event title | 1st European Conference of the International Association of Consumer Law |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Cambridge, United KingdomShow on map |