Founder of the Deceptive Patterns Initiative & Expert Witness
Harry is a distinguished user experience (UX) director, passionately committed to exposing deceptive design practices. He is the author of the book Deceptive Patterns and from time to time works as an expert witness in lawsuits that involve deceptive patterns.
Consultant in AI, Digital, Legal and Platform Regulation; Visiting Professor at the Riga Graduate School of Law
Dr Mark Leiser is a renowned authority on the legal ramifications of deceptive design and an expert witness in deceptive design cases, with a prolific body of work on applying laws and regulations to tackle deceptive patterns.
AI Design Engineer and Design Systems Expert
Assistant Professor in Privacy and Data Protection Law, Utrecht University School of Law
Graduate student at the School of Transnational Governance, European University Institute
UX/UI Designer & Legal Researcher
This website was launched in 2010. Lots of people have helped out a lot along the way, including: Kosha Doshi, Marc Miquel, Alex Goluszko, James Offer, Joe Dollar-Smirnov, Jeremy Rosenberg and Mart Gordon.
This website (formerly darkpatterns.org) was started in 2010, born out of Harry Brignull’s passion for addressing the growing issue of manipulative, deceptive and coercive design patterns in the digital world. Recognising the negative impact these patterns had on users, Harry was inspired to start a campaign that would expose these patterns, educate the public, and foster a more transparent digital landscape.
This site has played a pivotal role in shaping the conversation around ethical design practices. Its concepts and terminology have been adopted in new laws and regulations around the world, including the EU Digital Services Act (DSA), Digital Markets Act (DMA), California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA) and many others. Regulators have also taken a keen interest, and it is becoming an increasingly common topic in class action lawsuits.
The addition of Mark Leiser, Cristiana Santos and Kosha Doshi to the team has enabled us to grow this website’s vision into something bigger and more powerful — tying together manipulative, deceptive and coercive patterns with the laws that they break and the enforcement actions that have resulted from their use. The intention is to arm people with indisputable facts about deceptive patterns: not just the means to point them out, but to explain the specific laws broken and present the fines that have resulted when other companies have done the same.
Working on this campaign, Harry Brignull has been interviewed or quoted by numerous news organisations including the BBC, CBC, ABC, CNN, the New York Times, Vox, Fast Company, Consumer Reports, Marketplace and many others. You can view the articles, podcasts and video clips in the reading list area of this site.
This website was previously called darkpatterns.org and the category of manipulative, coercive or deceptive design practice was referred to as “dark patterns”. Under advice from the Tech Policy Design Lab of the World Wide Web Foundation, the domain name was changed to deceptive.design and the term was changed to “manipulative, deceptive and coercive patterns” — or, in abbreviated form, “deceptive patterns”. The change reflects a commitment to avoiding language that might inadvertently carry negative associations or reinforce harmful stereotypes.
