Dark Patterns after the GDPR: Scraping Consent Pop-ups and Demonstrating their Influence

By Midas Nouwens, Ilaria Liccardi, Michael Veale, David R Karger, Lalana Kagal. International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2020

486 citations recorded by the source corpus.

New consent management platforms (CMPs) have been introduced to the web to conform with the EU's General Data Protection Regulation, particularly its requirements for consent when companies collect and process users' personal data. This work analyses how the most prevalent CMP designs affect people's consent choices. We scraped the designs of the five most popular CMPs on the top 10,000 websites in the UK (n=680). We found that dark patterns and implied consent are ubiquitous; only 11.8% meet our minimal requirements based on European law. Second, we conducted a field experiment with 40 participants to investigate how the eight most common designs affect consent choices. We found that notification style (banner or barrier) has no effect; removing the opt-out button from the first page increases consent by 22-23 percentage points; and providing more granular controls on the first page decreases consent by 8-20 percentage points. This study provides an empirical basis for the necessary regulatory action to enforce the GDPR, in particular the possibility of focusing on the centralised, third-party CMP services as an effective way to increase compliance.

Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Information Systems, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7c85836df9e2f97ba3bff43317a09471b1fef3f3

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Clinical Psychology

1. Arunesh Mathur
2. Jonathan R. Mayer

In Information Systems

1. Inioluwa Deborah Raji
2. Arjun Narayan
3. Mary Anne Smart

In Sociology and Political Science

1. Jonathan R. Mayer
2. Inioluwa Deborah Raji
3. Mary Anne Smart
4. Arjun Narayan

Citations in the corpus

• Outsider Oversight: Designing a Third Party Audit Ecosystem for AI Governance (2022, background): “In some cases, users were purposefully inundated with notices designed to induce them to consent by default [102, 109, 114, 146].”
• What Makes a Dark Pattern... Dark?: Design Attributes, Normative Considerations, and Measurement Methods (2021, methodology): “” A whole host of subsequent research considers how dark patterns diminish privacy [33, 39, 42, 47, 56, 59].”