Global policymakers are increasingly fed up with manipulative and coercive user interface designs. In the last few years, legislation aimed to curb the use of “dark patterns” — those irritating and manipulative design tactics that digital interface designers use to get people to do what they want, like a consent choice that shouts “Accept” and whispers “Reject,” or a subscription that’s near impossible to cancel — has emerged from California to Brussels. There’s a growing consensus among lawmakers and the public that the designers of software interfaces have an inordinate amount of influence over the choices made by their customers, and that companies use that influence to exert decisional interference by coercing, manipulating, and even deceiving customers into making choices that benefit the company at their customers’ expense.
In the U.S., for example, there have been multiple efforts to rein in this influence. California’s new and incipient privacy laws aim to prevent decisional interference when exercising one’s right to opt-out of data collection, as well as when consenting to the collection of personal data; a bill in Washington state does the same. And recently, the Federal Trade Commission announced it was seeking public comment in its revision of its advertising disclosures guidelines, specifically to address the growing use of manipulative designs.
However, the latest regulatory attempts have come in the form of the E.U.’s landmark pair of internet legislation packages, the Digital Services Act (DSA) and Digital Markets Act (DMA). The DMA’s final text, published in May, includes at least two articles with implications for dark patterns. And the DSA, while not yet finalized, addresses dark patterns in its final drafts in more detail.
The impact of both packages, like the prior impact of the Europe’s comprehensive data privacy regulation, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), also has the potential to spill far beyond the E.U.’