Provides essential insights on dark patterns and AI-powered deceptive design for anyone who wants to understand and challenge the pervasive influence of these hidden forces shaping our digital experiences.
Provides essential insights on dark patterns and AI-powered deceptive design for anyone who wants to understand and challenge the pervasive influence of these hidden forces shaping our digital experiences.
This book provides essential insights on dark patterns and AI-powered deceptive design for anyone who wants to understand and challenge the pervasive influence of these hidden forces shaping our digital experiences.
These hidden design strategies – from personalised user interface triggers to sophisticated backend systems – are often used to manipulate user behaviour in ways that benefit businesses at the expense of users. With advanced profiling driven by AI, these deceptive techniques can tailor digital environments to each user, raising significant questions about privacy, control and the boundaries of digital design.
The book examines the response of regulators, from the GDPR, Digital Services Act and AI Act in the EU to emerging frameworks in the USA, Brazil and India. Through real-world examples, it explains how these laws fail to address deceptive design practices and explores the implications for privacy, autonomy and consumer protection in the digital age.
By uncovering the complex layers of modern deceptive design, the book equips readers with the knowledge to recognise these tactics and consider their impact on user choice and trust. It is essential reading for legal professionals, digital rights advocates, designers, and anyone invested in fair digital practices.
Tene and Polonetsky expounded a Theory of Creepy in 2013. Dr Leiser’s book shows today how well beyond creepy and even overshooting downright sneaky many digital services are by design today. His book lays out in stark terms the real harms, including of financial loss and a dangerous erosion of trust and autonomy, that ensue from the digital manipulation to which we are daily subject. Children and more vulnerable internet users are the most adversely affected.
Dr Leiser’s text is a timely and accessible illumination of the issue of deceptive design in digital services that provides up-to-date and expanded language to describe the range of “dark patterns” phenomena we sometimes can’t see but experience. He carefully illustrates the challenges globally these issues present for enforcement as they cut through and sometimes find gaps in consumer, data protection, privacy and sectoral laws. The book thoughtfully proposes realistic and layered solutions which are all the more urgent given the now turbocharging effects of AI. This book is a very important opportunity to act and change course and to do so right now.
MR Leiser, formerly of Vrije Universiteit-Amsterdam and Leiden University, the Netherlands, is an expert specialising in digital, legal, and platform regulation.
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