Dark Patterns at Scale: Findings From A Crawl of 11K Shopping Websites

81
Dark Patterns at Scale: Findings from a Crawl of 11K

Shopping Websites
ARUNESH MATHUR, Princeton University, USA

arXiv:1907.07032v2 [cs.HC] 20 Sep 2019
GUNES ACAR, Princeton University, USA

MICHAEL J. FRIEDMAN, Princeton University, USA
ELENA LUCHERINI, Princeton University, USA
JONATHAN MAYER, Princeton University, USA
MARSHINI CHETTY, University of Chicago, USA
ARVIND NARAYANAN, Princeton University, USA
Dark patterns are user interface design choices that benefit an online service by coercing, steering, or deceiving
users into making unintended and potentially harmful decisions. We present automated techniques that enable
experts to identify dark patterns on a large set of websites. Using these techniques, we study shopping
websites, which often use dark patterns to influence users into making more purchases or disclosing more
information than they would otherwise. Analyzing ∼53K product pages from ∼11K shopping websites, we
discover 1,818 dark pattern instances, together representing 15 types and 7 broader categories. We examine
these dark patterns for deceptive practices, and find 183 websites that engage in such practices. We also
uncover 22 third-party entities that offer dark patterns as a turnkey solution. Finally, we develop a taxonomy
of dark pattern characteristics that describes the underlying influence of the dark patterns and their potential
harm on user decision-making. Based on our findings, we make recommendations for stakeholders including
researchers and regulators to study, mitigate, and minimize the use of these patterns.
CCS Concepts: • Human-centered computing → Empirical studies in HCI; HCI theory, concepts and
models; • Social and professional topics → Consumer products policy; • Information systems →
Browsers.
Additional Key Words and Phrases: Dark Patterns; Consumer Protection; Deceptive Content; Nudging;
Manipulation
ACM Reference Format:

Arunesh Mathur, Gunes Acar, Michael J. Friedman, Elena Lucherini, Jonathan Mayer, Marshini Chetty,
and Arvind Narayanan. 2019. Dark Patterns at Scale: Findings from a Crawl of 11K Shopping Websites. Proc.
ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 3, CSCW, Article 81 (November 2019), 32 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3359183
Authors’ addresses: Arunesh Mathur, Princeton University, 304 Sherrerd Hall, Princeton, NJ, 08544, USA, amathur@cs.
princeton.edu; Gunes Acar, Princeton University, 320 Sherrerd Hall, Princeton, NJ, 08544, USA, gunes@princeton.edu;
Michael J. Friedman, Princeton University, 35 Olden Street, Princeton, NJ, 08544, USA, mjf4@princeton.edu; Elena Lucherini,
Princeton University, 312 Sherrerd Hall, Princeton, NJ, 08544, USA, elucherini@cs.princeton.edu; Jonathan Mayer, Princeton
University, 307 Sherrerd Hall, Princeton, NJ, 08544, USA, jonathan.mayer@princeton.edu; Marshini Chetty, University
of Chicago, 355 John Crerar Library, Chicago, IL, 60637, USA, marshini@uchicago.edu; Arvind Narayanan, Princeton
University, 308 Sherrerd Hall, Princeton, NJ, 08544, USA, arvindn@cs.princeton.edu.
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https://doi.org/10.1145/3359183
Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact., Vol. 3, No. CSCW, Article 81. Publication date: November 2019.
81:2 Arunesh Mathur et al.
1 INTRODUCTION
Dark patterns [32, 48] are user interface design choices that benefit an online service by coercing,
steering, or deceiving users into making decisions that, if fully informed and capable of selecting
alternatives, they might not make. Such interface design is an increasingly common occurrence on
digital platforms including social media websites [46], shopping websites [32], mobile apps [5, 31],
and video games [85]. At best, dark patterns annoy and frustrate users. At worst, they can mislead
and deceive users, e.g., by causing financial loss [1, 2], tricking users into giving up vast amounts of
personal data [46], or inducing compulsive and addictive behavior in adults [74] and children [21].
While prior work [31, 32, 38, 48] has provided taxonomies to describe the existing types of
dark patterns, there is no large-scale evidence documenting their prevalence, or a systematic and
descriptive investigation of how the different types of dark patterns harm users. Collecting this
information would allow us to first examine where, how often, and the technical means by which
dark patterns appear; second, it would allow us to compare and contrast how various dark patterns
influence users. In doing so, we can develop countermeasures against dark patterns to both inform
users and protect them from such patterns. Further, given that many of these patterns are potentially
unlawful, we can also aid regulatory agencies in addressing and mitigating their use.
In this paper, we present an automated approach that enables experts to identify dark patterns
at scale on the web. Our approach relies on (1) a web crawler, built on top of OpenWPM [25, 40]—a
web privacy measurement platform—to simulate a user browsing experience and identify user
interface elements; (2) text clustering to extract all user interface designs from the resulting data;
and (3) inspecting the resulting clusters for instances of dark patterns. We also develop a taxonomy
so that researchers can share descriptive and comparative terminology to explain how dark patterns
subvert user decision-making and lead to harm. We base this taxonomy on the characteristics of
dark patterns as well as the cognitive biases they exploit in users.
While our automated approach generalizes, we focus this study on shopping websites, which are
used by an overwhelming majority of people worldwide [41]. Dark patterns found on these websites
trick users into signing up for recurring subscriptions and making unwanted purchases, resulting in
concrete financial loss. We use our web crawler to visit the ∼11K most popular shopping websites
worldwide, create a large data set of dark patterns, and document their prevalence. Our data set
contains several new instances and variations of previously documented dark patterns [32, 48].
Finally, we use our taxonomy of dark pattern characteristics to classify and describe the patterns
we discover. We have five main findings:
• We discovered 1,818 instances of dark patterns on shopping websites, which together repre-
sent 15 types of dark patterns and 7 broad categories.
• These 1,818 dark patterns were found on 1,254 of the ∼11K shopping websites (∼11.1%) in our
data set. Shopping websites that were more popular, according to Alexa rankings [9], were
more likely to feature dark patterns. These numbers represent a lower bound on the total
number of dark patterns on these websites, since our automated approach only examined
text-based user interfaces on a sample of product pages per website.
• In using our taxonomy to classify the dark patterns in our data set, we discovered that
the majority are covert, deceptive, and information hiding in nature. Further, many patterns
exploit cognitive biases, such as the default and framing effects. These characteristics and
biases collectively describe the consumer psychology underpinnings of the dark patterns we
identified.
• We uncovered 234 instances of dark patterns—across 183 websites—that exhibit deceptive
behavior. We highlight the types of dark patterns we encountered that rely on deception.
Dark Patterns at Scale 81:3
• We identified 22 third-party entities that provide shopping websites with the ability to create
and implement dark patterns on their sites. Two of these entities openly advertised practices
that enable deceptive messages.
Through this study, we make the following contributions:
• We contribute automated measurement techniques that enable expert analysts to discover
new or revisit existing instances of dark patterns on the web. As part of this contribution, we
make our web crawler and associated technical artifacts available on GitHub1 . These can be
used to conduct longitudinal measurements on shopping websites or be re-purposed for use
on other types of websites (e.g., travel and ticket booking websites).
• We create a data set and measure the prevalence of dark patterns on 11K shopping websites.
We make this data set of dark patterns and our automated techniques publicly available2 to
help researchers, journalists, and regulators raise awareness of dark patterns [21], and to
help develop user-facing tools to combat these patterns.
• We contribute a novel descriptive taxonomy that provides precise terminology to characterize
how each dark pattern works. This taxonomy can aid researchers and regulators to better
understand and compare the underlying influence and harmful effects of dark patterns.
• We document the third-party entities that enable dark patterns on websites. This list of third
parties can be used by existing tracker and ad-blocking extensions (e.g., Ghostery,3 Adblock
Plus4 ) to limit their use on websites.
2 RELATED WORK
2.1 Online Shopping and Influencing User Behavior
Starting with Hanson and Kysar, numerous scholars have examined how companies abuse users’
cognitive limitations and biases for profit, a practice they call market manipulation [50]. For instance,
studies have shown that users make different decisions from the same information based on how
it is framed [80, 81], giving readily accessible information greater weight [79], and becoming
susceptible to impulsively changing their decision the longer the reward from their decision is
delayed [28]. Some argue that because users are not always capable of acting in their own best
interests, some forms of ‘paternalism’—a term referring to the regulation or curation of the user’s
options—may be acceptable [78]. However, determining the kinds of curation that are acceptable is
less straightforward, particularly without documenting the practices that already exist.
More recently, Calo has argued that market manipulation is exacerbated by digital marketplaces
since they posses capabilities that increase the chance of user harm culminating in financial loss,
loss of privacy, and the ability to make independent decisions [34]. For example, unlike brick-and-
mortar stores, digital marketplaces can capture and retain user behavior information, design and
mediate user interaction, and proactively reach out to users. Other studies have suggested that
certain elements in shopping websites can influence impulse buying behavior [60, 86]. For instance,
perceived scarcity, social influence (e.g., ‘social proof’—informing users of others’ behavior—and
shopping with others [33, 61]) can all lead to higher spending. More recently, Moser et al. conducted
a study [65] to measure the prevalence of elements that encourage impulse buying. They identified
64 such elements—e.g., product reviews/ratings, discounts, and quick add-to cart buttons—by
manually scraping 200 shopping websites.
1 https://github.com/aruneshmathur/dark-patterns
2 https://webtransparency.cs.princeton.edu/dark-patterns
3 https://ghostery.com
4 https://adblockplus.com
2.2 Dark Patterns in User Interface Design

Coined by Brignull in 2010, dark patterns is a catch-all term for how user interface design can
be used to adversely influence users and their decision-making abilities. Brignull described dark
patterns as ‘tricks used in websites and apps that make you buy or sign up for things that you
didn’t mean to’, and he created a taxonomy of dark patterns using examples from shopping and
travel websites to help raise user awareness. The taxonomy documented patterns such as ‘Bait and
Switch’ (the user sets out to do one thing, but a different, undesirable thing happens instead), and
‘Confirmshaming’ (using shame tactics to steer the user into making a choice).
2.2.1 Dark Pattern Taxonomies. A growing number of studies have expanded on Brignull’s orig-
inal taxonomy more systematically to advance our understanding of dark patterns. Conti and
Sobiesk [38] were the first to create a taxonomy of malicious interface design techniques, which
they defined as interfaces that manipulate, exploit, or attack users. While their taxonomy contains
no examples and details on how the authors created the taxonomy are limited, it contains sev-
eral categories that overlap with Brignull’s dark patterns, including ‘Confusion’ (asking the user
questions or providing information that they do not understand) and ‘Obfuscation’ (hiding desired
information and interface elements). More recently, Bösch et al. [31] presented a similar, alternative
breakdown of privacy-specific dark patterns as ‘Dark Strategies’, uncovering new patterns: ‘Forced
Registration’ (requiring account registration to access some functionality) and ‘Hidden Legalese
Stipulations’ (hiding malicious information in lengthy terms and conditions). Finally, Gray et
al. [48] presented a broader categorization of Brignull’s taxonomy and collapsed many patterns into
categories such as ‘Nagging’ (repeatedly making the same request to the user) and ‘Obstruction’
(preventing the user from accessing functionality).
While these taxonomies have focused on the web, researchers have also begun to examine dark
patterns in specific application domains. For instance, Lewis [57] analyzed design patterns in the
context of web and mobile applications and games, and codified those patterns that have been
successful in making apps ‘irresistible’, such as ‘Pay To Skip’ (in-app purchases that skip levels
of a game). In another instance, Greenberg et al. [49] analyzed dark patterns and ‘antipatterns’—
interface designs with unintentional side-effects on user behavior—that leverage users’ spatial
relationship with digital devices. They introduced patterns such as ‘Captive Audience’ (inserting
unrelated activities such as an advertisement during users’ daily activities) and ‘Attention Grabber’
(visual effects that compete for users’ attention). Finally, Mathur et al. [63] discovered that most
affiliate marketing on social media platforms such as YouTube and Pinterest is not disclosed to
users (the ‘Disguised Ads’ dark pattern).
2.2.2 Dark Patterns and User Decision-making. A growing body of work has drawn connections
between dark patterns and various theories of human decision-making in an attempt to explain how
dark patterns work and cause harm to users. Xiao and Benbasat [84] proposed a theoretical model
for how users are affected by deceptive marketing practices in online shopping, including affective
mechanisms (psychological or emotional motivations) and cognitive mechanisms (perceptions
about a product). In another instance, Bösch et al. [31] used Kahneman’s Dual process theory [79]
which describes how humans have two modes of thinking—‘System 1’ (unconscious, automatic,
possibly less rational) and ‘System 2’ (conscious, rational)—and noted how ‘Dark Strategies’ exploit
users’ System 1 thinking to get them to make a decision desired by the designer. Lastly, Lewis
[57] linked each of the dark patterns described in his book to Reiss’s Desires, a popular theory
of psychological motivators [72]. Finally, a recent study by the Norwegian Consumer Council
(Frobrukerrådet) [46] examined how interface designs on Google, Facebook, and Windows 10 make
it hard for users to exercise privacy-friendly options. The study highlighted the default options and
framing statements that enable such dark patterns.
2.3 Comparison to Prior Work

Our study differs from prior work in two ways. First, while prior work has largely focused on
creating taxonomies of the types of dark patterns either based on anecdotal data [31, 32] or data
collected from users’ submissions [38, 48], we provide large-scale evidence documenting the
presence and prevalence of dark patterns in the wild. Automated measurements of this kind have
proven useful in discovering various privacy and security issues on the web—including third-party
tracking [25, 40] and detecting vulnerabilities of remote third-party JavaScript libraries [68]—by
documenting how and on which websites these issues manifest, thus enabling practical solutions
to counter them. Second, we expand on the insight offered by prior work about how dark patterns
affect users. We develop a comprehensive taxonomy of dark pattern characteristics (Section 3) that
concretely explains the underlying influence and harmful effects of each dark pattern.
Finally, while prior work has shed light on impulse buying on shopping websites, the focus of our
work is on dark patterns. While there is some overlap between certain types of dark patterns and
impulse buying features of shopping websites [65], the majority of impulse buying elements are
not dark patterns. For instance, offering returns and exchanges for products, or showing multiple
images of a product [65] do not constitute dark patterns: even though they play a role in persuading
users into purchasing products, they do not fundamentally subvert user decision-making in a
manner that benefits shopping websites and retailers.
3 A TAXONOMY OF DARK PATTERN CHARACTERISTICS

Our taxonomy explains how dark patterns affects user decision-making based on their charac-
teristics as well as the cognitive biases in users—deviations from rational behavior justified by
some ‘biased’ line of reasoning [51]—they exploit to their advantage. We ground this taxonomy
in the literature on online manipulation [34, 77, 83] and by studying the types of dark patterns
highlighted in previous work [32, 48]. Our taxonomy consists of the following five dimensions:
• Asymmetric: Does the user interface design impose unequal weights or burdens on the
available choices presented to the user in the interface?5 For instance, a website may present
a prominent button to accept cookies on the web but make the opt-out button less visible, or
even hide it in another page.
• Covert: Is the effect of the user interface design choice hidden from users? That is, does the
interface design to steer users into making specific purchases without their knowledge? For
instance, a website may leverage the decoy effect [52] cognitive bias, in which an additional
choice—the decoy—is introduced to make certain other choices seem more appealing. Users
may fail to recognize the decoy’s presence is merely to influence their decision making,
making its effect covert.
• Deceptive: Does the user interface design induce false beliefs either through affirmative
misstatements, misleading statements, or omissions? For instance, a website may offer a
discount to users that appears to be limited-time, but actually repeats when the user refreshes
the website’s page. Users may be aware that the website is trying to offer them a discount;
however, they may not realize that they do not have a limited time to take advantage of the
deal. This false belief affects users’ decision-making i.e., they may act differently if they knew
that the sale is recurring.
5 We narrow the scope of asymmetry to only refer to explicit choices in the interface.
• Hides Information: Does the user interface obscure or delay the presentation of necessary
information to the user? For instance, a website may not disclose additional charges for a
product to the user until the very end of their checkout.
• Restrictive: Does the user interface restrict the set of choices available to users? For instance,
a website may only allow users to sign up for an account with existing social media accounts
so they can gather more information about them.
Many types of dark patterns operate by exploiting cognitive biases in users. In Section 5, we
draw an explicit connection between each type of dark pattern we encounter and the cognitive
biases it exploits. The biases we refer to in our findings are:
(1) Anchoring Effect [79]: The tendency of individuals to overly rely on an initial piece of
information—the ‘anchor’—in future decisions.
(2) Bandwagon Effect [75]: The tendency of individuals to value something more because others
seem to value it.
(3) Default Effect [54]: The tendency of individuals to stick with options that are assigned to
them by default due to inertia.
(4) Framing Effect [80]: The tendency of individuals to reach different decisions from the same
information depending on how it is presented.
(5) Scarcity Bias [64]: The tendency of individuals to place a higher value on things that are
scarce.
(6) Sunk Cost Fallacy [29]: The tendency of individuals to continue an action if they have invested
resources into it, even if that action might make them worse off.
4 METHOD
Dark patterns may manifest in several different locations inside websites, and they can rely heavily
upon interface manipulation, such as changing the hierarchy of interface elements or prioritizing
certain options over others using different colors. However, many dark patterns are often present
on users’ primary interaction paths in an online service or website (e.g., when purchasing a product
on a shopping website, or when a game is paused after a level is completed). Further, multiple
instances of a type of dark pattern share common traits such as the text they display (e.g., in the
‘Confirmshaming’ dark pattern—which tries to shame the user into making a particular choice—
many messages begin with No thanks). Our technique relies on automating the primary interaction
path of websites, extracting textual interface elements present in this path, and finally, grouping
and organizing these—using clustering—for an expert analyst to sift through.
While our method generalizes to different types of websites, we focus on shopping websites in
this study. We designed a web crawler capable of navigating users’ primary interaction path on
shopping websites: making a product purchase. Our crawler aligned closely with how an ordinary
user would browse and make purchases on shopping websites: discover pages containing products
on a website, add these products to the cart, and check out. We describe these steps, and the data
we collected during each visit to a website below. Figure 1 illustrates an overview of our method.
We note that only analyzing textual information in this manner restricts the set of dark patterns
we can discover, making our findings a lower bound on the dark patterns employed by shopping
websites. We leave detecting other kinds of dark patterns—those that are enabled using style, color,
and other non-textual features—to future work, and we discuss possible approaches in Section 6.
4.1 Creating a Corpus of Shopping Websites

We used the following criteria to evaluate existing lists of popular shopping websites, and, eventually,
construct our own: (1) the list must be representative of the most popular shopping websites globally,
and (2) the list must consist of shopping websites in English so that we would have the means to
analyze the data collected from the websites.
We retrieved a list of popular websites worldwide from Alexa using the Top Sites API [9]. Alexa
is a web traffic analysis company that ranks and categorizes websites based on statistics it collects
from users of its toolbar. We used the Top Sites list because it is more stable and is based on monthly
traffic and not daily rank, which fluctuates often [73] The list contained 361,102 websites in total,
ordered by popularity rank.6
We evaluated two website classification services to extract shopping websites from this list of the
most popular websites: Alexa Web Information Service [10] and WebShrinker [23]. We evaluated
the classification accuracy of these services using a random sample of 500 websites from our list
of 361K websites, which we manually labeled as ‘shopping’ or ‘not shopping’. We considered a
website to be a shopping website if it was offering a product for purchase. Of the 500 websites in our
sample, we labeled 57 as ‘shopping’ and 443 as ‘not shopping’. We then evaluated the performance
of both classifiers against this ground truth.
Table 3 in the Appendix summarizes the classifiers’ results. Compared to Webshrinker, Alexa’s
classifications performed poorly on our sample of websites (classification accuracy: 89% vs. 94%),
with a strikingly high false negative rate (93% vs. 18%). Although Webshrinker had a slightly higher
false positive rate (0.2% vs. 0.4%), we used methods to determine and remove these false positives
as we describe in Section 4.2.1.
We subsequently used Webshrinker to classify our list of 361K websites, obtaining a list of 46,569
shopping websites. To filter out non-English websites, we downloaded home pages of each site using
Selenium [8] and ran language detection on texts extracted from the pages using the polyglot
Python library [4]. Our final data set contained 19,455 English language shopping websites. We
created this filtered list in August 2018.
4.2 Data Collection with a Website Crawl

We conducted all our crawls from the Princeton University campus using two off-the-shelf com-
puters, both equipped with 16G of memory and quad-core CPUs. Our crawler’s exploration of
each shopping website mimicked a typical user’s primary interaction path on a shopping website—
starting with one of its product pages. Therefore, the first step in our website crawl was to determine
ways to automatically identify product URLs from shopping websites.
4.2.1 Discovering Product URLs on Shopping Websites. To effectively extract product URLs from
shopping websites, we iteratively designed and built a Selenium-based web crawler that contained
a classifier capable of distinguishing product URLs from non-product URLs.
At first, we build a naïve depth-first crawler that, upon visiting a website’s home page, determined
the various URLs on the page, selected one URL at random, and then repeated this process from the
selected URL. Using this crawler, we assembled a data set of several thousand URLs from visiting a
random sample of 100 websites from our data set of 19K shopping websites. We manually labeled a
sample of these URLs either as ‘product’ or ‘non-product’ URLs, and created a balanced data set
containing 714 labeled URLs in total.
We trained a Logistic Regression classifier on this data set of labeled URLs using the SGDClassifier
class from scikit-learn [71]. We extracted several relevant features from this data set of URLs, in-
cluding the length of a URL, the length of its path, the number of forward slashes and hyphens in
6 We did not use Alexa’s list of Top/Shopping websites [22] because of two issues. First, its criteria of categorization are not
fully disclosed. Second, most of the websites in the list had an average monthly rank > 500,000, which we did not consider
to be representative of the most popular websites worldwide.
Webshrinker polyglot Language

Classiﬁer Classiﬁer
Corpus CreaDon
361K Websites From 47K Shopping 19K English

Alexa Top Sites Websites Shopping Websites
• 13M Segments
• HTTP Requests
& Responses
Checkout
Crawler
Data CollecDon
• HAR Files
• HTML Sources
• Page Screenshots
Product Page 53K Product Pages

Crawler From 11K Shopping
Websites
Manual
ExaminaDon
Data Analysis Dark PaSerns
Hierarchical
Clustering using
HDBSCAN
Fig. 1. Overview of the shopping website corpus creation, data collection using crawling, and data analysis
using hierarchical clustering stages.
its path, and whether its path contained the words ‘product’ or ‘category’. We used 90% of the URLs
for training and obtained an 83% average classification accuracy using five-fold cross validation.
We embedded this classifier into our original Selenium-based web crawler to help guide its crawl.
As a result, rather than selecting and visiting URLs at random, the crawler first used the classifier
to rank the URLs on a page by likelihood of being product URLs, and then visited the URL with the
highest likelihood. The crawler declared a URL as product if its page contained an ‘Add to cart’ or
similar button. We detected this button by assigning a weighted score to visible HTML elements
on a page based on their size, color, and whether they matched certain regular expressions (e.g.,
‘Add to bag|cart|tote|. . . ’). This check also helped us weed out any false positives that may have
resulted from the classification of shopping websites using Webshrinker (Section 4.1).
We tuned the crawler’s search process to keep its crawl tractable. The crawler returned to the
home page after flagging a product URL. It did not visit a given URL more than two times to avoid
exploring the same URLs, and it stopped after visiting 100 URLs or spending 15 minutes on a site.
We determined these termination limits by running test crawls on random samples of shopping
websites. Finally, we opted to extract no more than five product pages from each shopping website.
To evaluate our crawler’s performance, we randomly sampled 100 shopping websites from our
corpus of 19K shopping websites and examined the product URLs the crawler returned for each
of these websites. For 86 of those 100 websites, our crawler successfully extracted and returned
legitimate product pages where they were present, and it returned no product pages where there
were not any. For the remaining 14 websites, the crawler either timed out because the website was
no longer reachable, the website included a step that the crawler could not handle (e.g., the website
required selecting a country of origin), or the ‘Add to cart’ button was incorrectly detected. We
then used the crawler on all of the 19K shopping websites, and in total we gathered 53,180 product
pages from 11,286 shopping websites.
4.2.2 Simulating Product Purchase Flows. To simulate a user’s typical shopping flow—which in-
cluded selecting certain product options (e.g., size or color), adding the product to the cart, viewing
the cart, and checking out—we designed and built an interactive ‘checkout crawler’.
We based our checkout crawler on OpenWPM, a fully instrumented browser platform that is
designed to conduct large-scale privacy and web-tracking measurement studies [40]. We extended
OpenWPM in a number of ways to interact with the product pages we collected previously, including
identifying various interface elements using scoring functions similar to the ones we described in
Section 4.2. Each of these functions would output the most likely ‘Add to cart’ buttons, ‘View cart’
buttons, and ‘Checkout’ buttons, which the crawler would click in–order across multiple pages.
Because websites do not follow uniform HTML markup and design, our crawler needed to account
for a variety of design alternatives and edge cases to simulate user interaction, such as dismissing
popup dialogs, and identifying and interacting with product options (e.g., selecting a size and color
for a t-shirt) to add a product to cart.
We collected three types of data during this crawl for each product page. First, we saved the page
source on visit. Second, we took screenshots each time the state of the page changed (e.g., clicking
a button or selecting a product option). Third, we extended OpenWPM’s HTTP instrumentation
to store HTTP Archive (HAR) [13]) files for each crawled page since HAR files are not limited to
HTTP headers and contain full response contents that can be used for further analysis.
To evaluate our crawler’s performance, we randomly sampled 100 product pages from the crawl
in Section 4.2.1 and examined whether our crawler was able to simulate a user’s shopping flow. In
66 of the 100 pages, our crawler reached the checkout page successfully. In 14 of the remaining 34,
the crawler was able to add the product to cart but it was unable to proceed to the cart page; most
often this was the result of complex product interaction (e.g., selecting the dimensions of a rug),
which our crawler was not designed to perform. In the remaining 20 cases, either we produced
Selenium exceptions, or failed to discover cart and checkout buttons. We then used the crawler
on all of the 53K product pages. We divided the 53K product URLs into two equal-length lists to
reduce the total crawling time. These crawls took approximately 90 hours to complete.
4.2.3 Capturing Meaningful Text Using Page Segmentation. The checkout crawler divided all the
pages it visited into meaningful page segments to help discover dark patterns. These segments can
be thought of as ‘building blocks’ of web pages, representing meaningful smaller sections of a web
page. These formed the basic units for our data analysis and clustering.
We defined segments as visible HTML elements that contained no other block-level elements [6]
and contained at least one text element—that is, elements of type TEXT_NODE [19]. However, since
websites may use a virtually endless variety of markup and designs, we iteratively developed our
segmentation algorithm, testing it on samples of shopping websites and accounting for possible
edge cases. Algorithm 1 and Figure 11 in the Appendix detail the segmentation algorithm and
illustrate its output for one web page, respectively.
Before segmenting each web page, the crawler waited for the page to load completely, also
accounting for the time needed for popup dialogs to appear. However, web pages may also display
text from subsequent user interactions, and with dynamically loaded content (e.g., a countdown
timer). To capture possible segments from such updates to the web page during a crawl—no matter
how minor or transient—we integrated the Mutation Summary [3] library into our checkout crawler.
The Mutation Summary library combines DOM MutationObserver events [18] into compound
event summaries that are easy to process. When the checkout crawler received a new Mutation
Summary representing updates to the page, it segmented (Algorithm 1) this summary and stored
the resulting segments.
For each segment, we stored its HTML Element type, its element text (via innerText), its
dimensions and coordinates on the page, and its style including its text and background colors. Our
crawls resulted in ∼13 million segments across the 53K product URL pages.
4.3 Data Analysis with Clustering

We employed hierarchical clustering to discover dark patterns from the data set of segments. Our
use of clustering was not to discover a set of latent constructs in the data but rather to organize the
segments in a manner that would be conducive to scanning, making it easier for an expert analyst
to sift through the clusters for possible dark patterns.
4.3.1 Data Preprocessing. Many of the ∼13 million segments collected during our crawls were
duplicates, such as multiple ‘Add to cart’ segments across multiple websites. Since we only used
text-based features for our analyses, we retained unique pieces of text across the websites in our
data set (e.g., one segment containing the text ‘Add to cart’ across all the websites in our data set).
We also replaced all numbers with a placeholder before performing this process to further reduce
duplicates. This preprocessing reduced the set of segments by 90% to ∼1.3 million segments.
4.3.2 Feature Representations and Hierarchical Clustering. Before performing clustering, we trans-
formed the text segments into a Bag of Words (BoW) representation. Each entry in the resulting
BoW matrix (Mi j ) indicated the number of times token j appeared in segment i.7 We filtered all stop
words8 and punctuation—except currency symbols, since these are indicative of product price—from
the list of tokens, and further only retained tokens that appeared in at least 100 segments. This
resulted in a vocabulary of 10,133 tokens.
Given this large size of our vocabulary—and thus the dimensions of the segment-token matrix—
we performed Principal Component Analysis (PCA) on the BoW matrix. We retained 3 components
from the PCA, which together captured more than 95% of the variance in the data.
We used the Hierarchical Density-Based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise (HDB-
SCAN) algorithm [35] implemented in the HDBSCAN Python library [14] to extract clusters from
this data. We chose HDBSCAN over other clustering algorithms since it is robust to noise in the
data, and it allows us to vary the minimum size of the clusters (min_cluster_size). We varied a
total of four passes at clustering: two min_cluster_size values (5 and 10) × two distance metrics
(Manhattan distance or L1 norm, and Euclidean distance or L2 norm). We picked sufficiently small
values for the min_cluster_size parameter to keep the size of the noise cluster small and to avoid
coercing segments into one cluster.
The clustering output across the BoW input was nearly the same. As expected, a min_cluster_size
of 10 resulted in a larger noise cluster compared to a min_cluster_size of 5—but only marginally
larger regardless of the distance metric. However, since the min_cluster_size of 10 produced
significantly fewer clusters, we picked its output over the others. It contained 10,277 clusters.
7 We did not use the Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) representation as upon clustering, it resulted
in anywhere between 70%-75% of the segments being classified as noise. We believe this may have been because of the
incorrect IDF scaling factor since the segments were not all drawn from a pool of independent observations—i.e., multiple
segments originated from the same website
8 Using Python NLTK [30]
## [21] 200000 210000 220000 230000 240000 250000 260000 270000 280000 290000
## [31] 300000 310000 320000 330000 340000 350000 360000
breakpoints
## [1] 5000 15000 25000 35000 45000 55000 65000 75000 85000 95000
## [11] 105000 115000 125000 135000 145000 155000 165000 175000 185000 195000
## [21] 205000 215000 225000 235000 245000 255000 265000 275000 285000 295000
## [31] 305000 315000 325000 335000 345000 355000 365000
vals <- dat$perc
length(vals) <- 37
freq <- as.vector(rep(input, vals))
hist(freq, breaks=seq(0,400000,l=42), ylim=c(0,20), xlab = "Alexa rank", ylab = "% Websites with >= 1 Dark Pattern", main=NULL, co
20
% Websites with >= 1 Dark Pattern
15
10
5
0
0e+00 1e+05 2e+05 3e+05 4e+05
Alexa rank
Fig. 2. Distribution of the dark patterns we discovered over the Alexa rank of the websites. Each bin indicates
2
the percentage of shopping websites in that bin that contained at least one dark pattern.
4.3.3 Examining and Analyzing the Clusters. Once the clustering was complete, we made two
passes through the data. The goal of pass one was to include clusters that contained any segments
that might manifest as dark patterns. In this pass, one researcher scanned the clusters and identified
possible clusters of interest, recording all those clusters that represented specific types of user
interfaces (e.g., login choices, cart totals), website characteristics (e.g., stock notifications), and
product options (e.g., small/medium/large) that generally appear on shopping websites. This step
filtered down the clusters from 10,277 to 1,768.
In pass two, we extracted all the websites that corresponded to these segments for further
examination. The research team used the literature on dark patterns [32, 48, 69] and impulse
buying [65], and media coverage of high-pressure sales and marketing tactics (e.g., [15]) to create a
shared understanding of possible dark patterns using the examples cited in these works to guide
our thinking. In order to validate the coding of clusters, two researchers examined a sample of
200 of the 1,768 clusters, and recorded any dark patterns they encountered. The researchers also
examined each website’s set of screenshots and visited the websites to gain context and additional
information surrounding the segments (e.g., discovering practices associated with the flagged
pattern). To measure agreement between the researchers, we computed Cohen’s kappa between
the segments that were recorded—resulting in a score of 0.74. The team discussed and resolved
all disagreements, and one researcher then examined the remaining clusters in the same manner.
The team then discussed the resulting dark patterns, and iteratively grouped them into types and
broader categories.
4.4 Detecting Deceptive Dark Patterns

We further examined many of the dynamic dark patterns—those patterns that displayed transient
values (e.g., a countdown timer)—for deceptive practices. To this end, we used our checkout crawler
to ‘monitor’ the websites containing dark patterns of interest once every four hours for a period of
five days. We combined this data with several dark pattern-specific heuristics—which we describe
in the following sections—to uncover instances of deceptive practices.
5 FINDINGS
In total, we discovered 1,818 instances of dark patterns from 1,254 (∼11.1%) websites in our data
set of 11K shopping websites. Given that (1) our crawler only explored the product pages, cart
pages, and checkout pages of websites, (2) our analyses only took text-based user interfaces into
Table 1. Categories and types of dark patterns along with their description, prevalence, and definitions.
Legend: = Always, G #= Sometimes, #= Never
Asymmetric?
Restrictive?
Hides Info?
# Instances
Deceptive?
# Websites
Covert?
Cognitive
Category Type Description
Biases
Sneaking Sneak into Basket Adding additional products to users’ shop- 7 7 # # G
# # Default
ping carts without their consent Effect
Hidden Costs Revealing previously undisclosed charges 5 5 # # G
# # Sunk
to users right before they make a purchase Cost
Fallacy
Hidden Subscription Charging users a recurring fee under the 14 13 # # G
# # None
pretense of a one-time fee or a free trial
Urgency Countdown Timer Indicating to users that a deal or discount 393 361 # G
# G
# # # Scarcity
will expire using a counting-down timer Bias
Limited-time Message Indicating to users that a deal or sale will 88 84 # G
# # # Scarcity
expire will expire soon without specifying Bias
a deadline
Misdirection Confirmshaming Using language and emotion (shame) to 169 164 # # # # Framing
steer users away from making a certain Effect
choice
Visual Interference Using style and visual presentation to steer 25 24 #
G # # # Anchoring
G
users to or away from certain choices & Fram-
ing Effect
Trick Questions Using confusing language to steer users 9 9 # # # Default &
into making certain choices Framing
Effect
Pressured Selling Pre-selecting more expensive variations of 67 62 # G
G # # # # Anchoring
a product, or pressuring the user to accept & Default
the more expensive variations of a product Effect,
and related products Scarcity
Bias
Social Proof Activity Message Informing the user about the activity on 313 264 # G
# G
# # # Bandwagon
the website (e.g., purchases, views, visits) Effect
Testimonials Testimonials on a product page whose ori- 12 12 # # G
# # # Bandwagon
gin is unclear Effect
Scarcity Low-stock Message Indicating to users that limited quantities 632 581 # G
# G
# G
# # Scarcity
of a product are available, increasing its de- Bias
sirability
High-demand Message Indicating to users that a product is in high- 47 43 # G
# # # # Scarcity
demand and likely to sell out soon, increas- Bias
ing its desirability
Obstruction Hard to Cancel Making it easy for the user to sign up for a 31 31 # # # G
# None
service but hard to cancel it
Forced Forced Enrollment Coercing users to create accounts or share 6 6 # # # None
Action their information to complete their tasks
account, this number represents a lower-bound estimate of the prevalence of dark patterns. We
divide our discussion of the findings by first illustrating the categories of dark patterns revealed by
our analyses, and then by describing our findings on the ecosystem of third-parties that enable
dark patterns.
5.1 Categories of Dark Patterns

Our analyses revealed 15 types of dark patterns contained in 7 broader categories. Where applicable,
we use the dark pattern labels proposed by Gray et al. [48] and Brignull [32] to describe these types
and categories. Table 1 summarizes our findings, highlighting the number of separate instances of
dark patterns found for each type.
Figure 2 shows the distribution of the websites containing dark patterns over their Alexa ranks.
The distribution suggests that dark patterns are more likely to appear on popular websites (Spear-
man’s Rho = -0.62, p < 0.0001). In the following sections, we describe the various categories and
types of dark patterns we discovered.
5.1.1 Sneaking. Coined by Gray et al. in their taxonomy [48], ‘Sneaking’ refers to the category of
dark patterns that attempt to misrepresent user actions, or hide/delay information that, if made
available to users, they would likely object to. We observed three types of the Sneaking dark
pattern: Sneak into Basket [32], Hidden Costs [32], and Hidden Subscription (Brignull’s Forced
Continuity [32]) on 23 shopping websites. Figure 3 highlights instances of these three types.
Sneak into Basket. The ‘Sneak into Basket’ dark pattern adds additional products to users’
shopping carts without their consent, often promoting the added products as ‘bonuses’ and ‘neces-
sary’. Sneak into Basket exploits the default effect cognitive bias in users, with the website behind
it hoping that users will stick with the products it adds to cart. One instance of Sneak into Basket is
shown in Figure 3a, where adding a bouquet of flowers to the shopping cart on avasflowers.net
also adds a greeting card. In another instance on laptopoutlet.co.uk —not shown in the figure—
adding an electronic product, such as a laptop, to the shopping cart also adds product insurance.
Other websites, such as cellularoutfitter.com, add additional products (e.g., a USB charger) to
the shopping cart using pre-selected checkboxes. While such checkboxes could be deselected by a
vigilant user, the additional products would be added by default in the absence of any intervention.
In our data set, we found a total of 7 instances of the Sneak into Basket dark pattern.
Using our taxonomy of dark pattern characteristics, we classify Sneak into Basket as at least
partially deceptive (it incorrectly represents the nature of the action of adding an item to the
shopping cart) and information hiding (it deliberately disguises how the additional products were
added to cart from users) in nature. However, it is not covert: users can visibly see and realize that
the website included additional products to their shopping carts.
Hidden Costs. The ‘Hidden Costs’ dark pattern reveals new, additional, and often unusually high
charges to users just before they are about to complete a purchase. Examples of such charges include
‘service fees’ or ‘handling costs’. Often these charges are only revealed at the end of a checkout
process, after the user has already filled out shipping/billing information, and consented to terms of
use. The Hidden Costs dark pattern exploits the sunk cost fallacy cognitive bias: users are likely to
feel so invested in the process that they justify the additional charges by completing the purchase to
not waste their effort. Figure 3b shows the Hidden Costs dark pattern on proflowers.com, where
the ‘Care & Handling’ charge of $2.99 is revealed immediately before confirming the order. In our
data set, we found a total of 5 instances of the Hidden Costs dark pattern.
Using our taxonomy of dark pattern characteristics, we classify Hidden Costs as at least partially
deceptive (it relies on minimizing and delaying information from users), and thus also information
hiding in nature. Like Sneak into Basket, Hidden Costs is not covert: users can visibly see and realize
that the website included additional charges.
Hidden Subscription. The ‘Hidden Subscription’ dark pattern charges users a recurring fee
under the pretense of a one-time fee or a free trial. Often, if at all, users become aware of the
(a) Sneak into Basket on avasflowers.net. Despite requesting no greeting cards, one worth $3.99 is automati-
cally added.
(b) Hidden Costs on proflowers (c) Hidden Subscription on wsjwine.com. Left: The website fails to
.com. The Care & Handling charge disclose that the Advantage service is an annual subscription worth $89
($2.99) is disclosed on the last step. unless the user clicks on Learn More. Right: The service in cart.
Fig. 3. Three types of the Sneaking category of dark patterns.
recurring fee once they are charged several days or months after their purchase. For instance, we
discovered that wsjwine.com offers users an Advantage service which appears to be a one-time
payment of $89 but renews annually, as shown in Figure 3c. Further, Hidden Subscription often
appears with the ‘Hard to Cancel’ dark pattern—which we describe in Section 5.1.6—thereby making
the recurring charges harder to cancel than signing up for them. In our data set, we found a total of
14 instances of Hidden Subscription dark pattern.
Using our taxonomy of dark pattern characteristics, we classify Hidden Subscription as at least
partially deceptive (it misleads users about the nature of the initial offer) and information hiding (it
withholds information about the recurring fees from users) in nature.
5.1.2 Urgency. ‘Urgency’ refers to the category of dark patterns that impose a deadline on a sale
or deal, thereby accelerating user decision-making and purchases [27, 37, 53, 69]. Urgency dark
patterns exploit the scarcity bias in users—making discounts and offers more desirable than they
would otherwise be, and signaling that inaction would result in losing out on potential savings.
These dark patterns create a potent ‘fear of missing out’ effect particularly when combined with
the Social Proof (Section 5.1.4) and Scarcity (Section 5.1.5) dark patterns.
We observed two types of the Urgency dark pattern: Countdown Timers and Limited-time
Messages on 437 shopping websites across their product, cart, and checkout pages. In product
pages, these indicated deadlines about site-wide sales and coupons, sales on specific products, or
shipping deadlines; in cart pages, they indicated deadlines about product reservation (e.g., ‘Your
cart will expire in 10:00 minutes, please check out now’) and coupons, urging users to complete
their purchase. Figure 4 highlights instances of these two types.
(a) Countdown Timer on mattressfirm.com. The header displays a Flash Sale where the majority of
discounted products remain the same on a day-to-day basis.
(b) Countdown Timer on justfab.com. The offer (c) Limited-time Message on chicwish.com. The website
is available even after the timer expires. claims the sale will end ‘soon’ without stating a deadline.
Fig. 4. Two types of the Urgency category of dark patterns.
Countdown Timers. The ‘Countdown Timer’ dark pattern is a dynamic indicator of a deadline,
counting down until the deadline expires. Figures 4a and 4b show the Countdown Timer dark
pattern on mattressfirm.com and justfab.com, respectively. One indicates the deadline for a
recurring Flash Sale, the other a Member Exclusive. In our data set, we found a total of 393 instances
of the Countdown Timer dark pattern.
Deceptive Countdown Timers. Using the visit-and-record method described in Section 4.4, we
examined the countdown timers in our data set for deceptive practices. We stitched the screenshots
of each countdown timer from the repeated visits of our crawler to a website into a video, and
viewed the resulting videos to observe the behavior of the timers. We considered a countdown
timer deceptive if (1) the timer reset after timeout with the same offer still valid, or (2) the timer
expired but the offer it claimed was expiring was still valid even following expiration.
In our data set, we discovered a total of 157 instances of deceptive Countdown Timers on 140
shopping websites. One such example is shown in Figure 4b on justfab.com, where the advertised
offer remains valid even after the countdown timer of 60 minutes expires.
Using our taxonomy of dark pattern characteristics, we classify Countdown Timers as partially
covert (it creates a heightened sense of immediacy, unbeknownst to at least some users), and
sometimes deceptive (it can mislead users into believing an offer is expiring when in reality it is
not) in nature.
Limited-time Messages. Unlike Countdown Timers, the ‘Limited-time Message’ dark pattern is
a static urgency message without an accompanying deadline. By not stating the deadline, websites
withhold information from users, and thus misrepresent the nature of the offer [20]. Figure 4c shows
an instance of the Limited-time Message dark pattern on chicwish.com, where the advertised sale
is stated to end ‘soon’ with no mention of the end date. For every such instance we discovered, we
verified that the shopping website made no disclosure about the accompanying deadline (e.g., in
(a) Confirmshaming on radioshack.com. (b) Visual Interference on greenfingers.com. The option to opt
The option to dismiss the popup is framed out of marketing communication is grayed, making it seem un-
to shame the user into avoiding it. available even though it can be clicked.
(c) Trick Questions on newbalance.co.uk. Opting out of marketing (d) Pressured Selling on
communication requires ticking the checkbox. 1800flowers.com. The most
expensive product is the default.
Fig. 5. Four types of the Misdirection category of dark patterns.
the fine print and in the terms of sale pages). In our data set, we discovered a total of 88 instances
of the Limited-time Message dark pattern.
Using our taxonomy of dark pattern characteristics, we classify Limited-time Messages as at
least partially covert (similar to Countdown Timers), and information hiding (unlike Countdown
Timers, they do not reveal the deadline in their offers) in nature.
5.1.3 Misdirection. The ‘Misdirection’ category of dark patterns uses visuals, language, and emo-
tion to steer users toward or away from making a particular choice. Misdirection functions by
exploiting different affective mechanisms and cognitive biases in users without actually restricting
the set of choices available to users. Our version of the Misdirection dark pattern is inspired by
Brignull’s original Misdirection dark pattern [32]. However, while Brignull considered Misdirection
to occur exclusively using stylistic and visual manipulation, we take a broader view of the term,
also including Misdirection caused by language and emotional manipulation.
We observed four types of the Misdirection dark pattern: Confirmshaming [32], Trick Ques-
tions [32], Visual Interference [48], and Pressured Selling on 244 shopping websites. Figure 5
highlights instances of these four types.
Confirmshaming. Coined by Brignull [32], the ‘Confirmshaming’ dark pattern uses language
and emotion to steer users away from making a certain choice. Confirmshaming appeared most
often in popup dialogs that solicited users’ email addresses in exchange for a discount, where
the option to decline the offer—which the website did not want users to select—was framed as a
shameful choice. Examples of such framing included ‘No thanks, I like paying full price’, ‘No thanks,
I hate saving money’, and ‘No thanks, I hate fun & games’. By framing the negative option as such,
the Confirmshaming dark pattern exploits the framing effect cognitive bias in users and shame, a
powerful behavior change agent [58]. Figure 5a shows one instance of the Confirmshaming dark
pattern on radioshack.com. In our data set, we found a total of 169 such instances.
Using our taxonomy of dark pattern characteristics, we classify Confirmshaming as asymmetric

(the opt-out choice shames users into avoiding it) in nature. However, Confirmshaming is not covert,
since users can visibly see and realize that the design is attempting to influence their choice.
Visual Interference. The ‘Visual Interference’ dark pattern uses style and visual presentation
to influence users into making certain choices over others (Brignull’s original description of
Misdirection [32]). Although we excluded style information in our clustering analysis, we extracted
these patterns as a consequence of examining the text the patterns displayed. In some instances,
websites used the Visual Interference dark pattern to make certain courses of action more prominent
over others. For example, the subscription offering on exposedskincare.com is stylistically more
prominent and emphasized than the non-subscription offering. In other instances, websites used
visual effects on textual descriptions to inflate the discounts available for products. For example,
websites such as dyson.co.uk and justfab.com offered free gifts to users, and then used these
gifts to inflate the savings on users’ purchases in the checkout page—even when the originally
selected product was not on discount. In one instance on greenfingers.com, we discovered that
the option to decline marketing communication is greyed out, creating an illusion that the option
is unavailable or disabled even though it can be clicked, as shown in Figure 5b. In our data set, we
found a total of 25 instances of the Visual Interference dark pattern.
Using our taxonomy of dark pattern characteristics, we classify Visual Interference as sometimes
asymmetric (in some instances it creates unequal choices, steering users into one choice over the
other), covert (users may not realize the effect the visual presentation has had on their choice), and
sometimes deceptive (e.g., when a website presents users with a ‘lucky draw’ from a list of potential
deals, but the draw process is deterministic unbeknownst to users) in nature.
Trick Questions. Also originating from Brignull’s taxonomy [32], the ‘Trick Questions’ dark
pattern uses confusing language to steer users into making certain choices. Like Confirmshaming,
Trick Questions attempt to overcome users’ propensity to opt out of marketing and promotional
messages by subtly inverting the entire opt-out process. Most often, websites achieved this effect
by introducing confusing double negatives (e.g., ‘Uncheck the box if you prefer not to receive email
updates’), or by using negatives to alter expected courses of action, such as checking a box to opt
out (e.g., ‘We would like to send you emails. If you do not wish to be contacted via email, please
ensure that the box is not checked’).
We note here that we only considered an opt-out choice as a Trick Question dark pattern when
it was misleading, such as when the user has to check a box and the text began with an affirmative
statement about the undesirable practice (e.g., ‘We want to send you marketing email...’) since these
would more likely be missed by users as opposed to ones that began with the opt-out choice (e.g.,
‘Please tick here to opt-out of...’).9 Trick Questions exploits the default and framing effect cognitive
biases in users, who become more susceptible to a choice they erroneously believe is aligned with
their preferences. Figure 5c shows one instance of Trick Questions on newbalance.co.uk. In our
data set, we found a total of 9 such instances, occurring most often during the checkout process
when collecting user information to complete purchases.
Using our taxonomy of dark pattern characteristics, we classify Trick Questions as asymmetric
(opting out is more burdensome than opting in) and covert (users fail to understand the effect of
their choice as a consequence of the confusing language) in nature.
9 We note that while Gray et al. [48] consider the latter as Trick Questions, we do not take that stance. However, we do
consider all opt-out messages as concerning. We discovered 23 instances of opt-out choices that did not begin with an
affirmative statement in total.
Pressured Selling. The ‘Pressured Selling’ dark pattern refers to defaults or often high-pressure
tactics that steer users into purchasing a more expensive version of a product (upselling) or into
purchasing related products (cross-selling). The Pressured Selling dark pattern exploits a variety of
different cognitive biases, such as the default effect, the anchoring effect, and the scarcity bias to
drive user purchasing behavior. Figure 5d shows one such instance on 1800flowers.com, where
the largest flower bouquet is selected by default. The dark pattern makes the most expensive option
the point of comparison—an ‘anchor’—and thus increases the probability of users overlooking
the least expensive option [70]. In another instance, on fashionworld.co.uk, the website opened
popup dialogs that the user had to explicitly decline immediately after adding a product to cart.
These dialogs urged users to buy more ‘Hot sellers’, ‘Deals’, and ‘Bundled’ products. In our data set,
we found a total of 67 instances of the Pressured Selling dark pattern.
Using our taxonomy of dark pattern characteristics, we classify Pressured Selling as sometimes
asymmetric (it pushes users towards accepting more expensive product options) and at least partially
covert (users fail to realize that they have purchased a more expensive product than they would
have, had they been defaulted with the least expensive product to begin with) in nature.
5.1.4 Social Proof. According to the social proof principle, individuals determine the correct
action and behavior for themselves in a given situation by examining the action and behavior of
others [37, 69]. The ‘Social Proof’ dark pattern uses this influence to accelerate user decision-making
and purchases, exploiting the bandwagon effect cognitive bias to its advantage. Studies have shown
that individuals are more likely to impulse buy when shopping with their peers and families [61].
We observed two types of the Social Proof dark pattern: Activity Notifications and Testimonials
of Uncertain Origin on 275 websites across their product and cart pages. In all these instances, the
Social Proof messages indicated other users’ activities and experiences shopping for products and
items. Figure 6 highlights instances of these two types.
Activity Notifications. The ‘Activity Notification’ dark pattern is a transient, often recurring
and attention grabbing message that appears on product pages indicating the activity of other
users. These can be grouped into different categories: dynamic and periodic messages that indicated
other users just bought a product (e.g., ‘Abigail from Michigan just bought a new stereo system’);
static or dynamic text to indicate how many users have a specific item in their cart (e.g., ‘35 people
added this item to cart’); and similar text to indicate how many users have viewed a product (e.g.,
‘90 people have viewed this product’). Figures 6a, 6b, and 6c highlight three instances of Activity
Notification on tkmaxx.com, thredup.com, and jcpenney.com, respectively. In our data set, we
found a total of 313 such instances.
Deceptive Activity Notifications. We examined the Activity Notification messages in our data set
for deceptive practices. To facilitate our analysis, we manually inspected the page source of each
shopping website that displayed these notifications to verify their integrity. We ignored all those
notifications that were generated server-side since we had limited insight into how and whether
they were truly deceptive. We considered an instance of Activity Notification to be deceptive if the
content it displayed—including any names, locations statistics, counts—was falsely generated or
made misleading statements.
In our data set, we discovered a total of 29 instances of deceptive Activity Notifications on 20
shopping websites. The majority of these websites generated their deceptive notifications in a
random fashion (e.g., using a random number generator to indicate the number of users who are
‘currently viewing’ a product) and others hard-coded previously generated notifications, meaning
they never changed. One notable case was thredup.com as shown in Figure 6b, where the website
(a) Activity Notification on tkmaxx.com. The message indi- (b) Activity Notification on thredup.com. The
cates how many people added the product to the cart in message always signals products as if they
the last 72 hours. were sold recently (‘just saved’), even in the
case of old purchases.
(c) Activity Notification on jcpenney.com. The (d) Testimonials of Uncertain Origin on

message indicates the number of people who coolhockey.com. We found the same tes-
viewed the product in the 24 hours along with timonials on ealerjerseys.com with dif-
the quantity left in stock. ferent customer names.
Fig. 6. Two types of the Social Proof category of dark patterns.
generated messages based on fictitious names and locations for an unvarying list of products that
was always indicated to be ‘just sold’.
Using our taxonomy of dark pattern characteristics, we classify Activity Notifications as partially
covert (in instances where the notifications are site-wide for example, users may fail to understand
their effect on their choices) and sometimes deceptive (the content of notifications can be deceptively
generated or misleading) in nature.
Testimonials of Uncertain Origin. The ‘Testimonials of Uncertain Origin’ dark pattern refers
to the use of customer testimonials whose origin or how they were sourced and created is not
clearly specified. For each instance of this dark pattern, we made two attempts to validate its origin.
First, we inspected the website to check if it contained a form to submit testimonials. Second, we
performed exact searches of the testimonials on a search engine (google.com) to check if they
appeared on other websites. Figure 6d shows one instance on coolhockey.com, where we found
the same set of testimonials on ealerjerseys.com with different customer names attached to
them. In our data set, we found a total of 12 instances of this pattern.
5.1.5 Scarcity. ‘Scarcity’ refers to the category of dark patterns that signal the limited availability
or high demand of a product, thus increasing its perceived value and desirability [37, 55, 62, 69]. We
observed two types of the Scarcity dark pattern: ‘Low-stock Messages’ and ‘High-demand Messages’
on 609 shopping websites across their product and cart pages. In both pages, they indicated the
limited availability of a product or that a product was in high demand and thus likely to become
unavailable soon. Figure 7 highlights instances of these two types.
(a) Low-stock Message on 6pm.com. Left: Choosing product options shows Only 3 left in stock.
Right: The out-of-stock product makes it seem that it just sold out.
(b) Low-stock on orthofeet (c) High-demand Message on fashionnova.com.

.com. Appears for all products. The message appears for all products in the cart.
Fig. 7. Two types of the Scarcity category of dark patterns.
Low-stock Messages. The ‘Low-stock Message’ dark pattern signals to users about limited
quantities of a product. Figure 7a shows an instance of this pattern on 6pm.com, displaying the
precise quantity in stock. In our data set, we found a total of 632 instances of the Low-stock Message
dark pattern. However, not all of these instances displayed stock quantities. 49 of these instances
only indicated that stock was limited or low, without displaying the exact quantity, resulting in
uncertainty, increased desirability of products, and impulse buying behavior in users. Figure 7b
shows one such instance on orthofeet.com.
Deceptive Low-stock Messages. We examined all the Low-stock Message dark patterns for de-
ceptive practices using the method described in Section 4.4. From the resulting data, we ignored
those websites whose stock amounts remained the same between visits, reasoning that those are
unlikely to be indicative of deceptive practices. We then manually examined the remaining sites
and identified how the stock information was generated.
In our data set, we discovered a total of 17 instances of deceptive Low-stock Messages on 17
shopping websites. On further examination, we observed that 16 of these sites decremented stock
amounts in a recurring, deterministic pattern according to a schedule, and the one remaining site
(forwardrevive.com) randomly generated stock values on page load. Exactly 8 of these sites used
third-party JavaScript libraries to generate the stock values, such as Hurrify [17] and Booster [11].
Both of these are popular plugins for Shopify—one of the largest e-Commerce companies—based
websites. The remaining websites injected stock amounts through first-party JavaScript or HTML.
Besides the use—or non-use—of numeric data and deception, Low-stock Messages can be con-
cerning in other ways. For example, we observed that several websites, such as 6pm.com and
orthofeet.com, displayed Low-stock Messages for nearly all their products—stating ‘Only X left’
and ‘Hurry, limited quantities left!’ respectively. The former, in particular, showed a ‘Sorry, this is
out of stock. You just missed it’ popup dialog for every product that was sold out, even if it had
already been out of stock in the previous days.
(a) Hard to Cancel on sportsmanguide.com. The website only discloses in the terms
PDF file that canceling the recurring service requires calling customer service.
(b) Hard to Cancel on savagex.com. The website discloses

upfront that the recurring service can only be canceled through
customer care.
Fig. 8. The Hard to Cancel type from the Obstruction category of dark patterns.
Using our taxonomy of dark pattern characteristics, we classify Low-stock Messages as partially
covert (it creates a heightened sense of impulse buying, unbeknownst to users), sometimes deceptive
(it can mislead users into believing a product is low on stock when in reality it is not, creating false
scarcity), and sometimes information hiding (in some instances, it does not explicitly specify the
stock quantities at hand) in nature.
High-demand Messages. The ‘High-demand Message’ dark pattern signals to users that a
product is in high demand, implying that it is likely to sell out soon. Figure 7c shows one such
instance on fashionnova.com on the cart page, indicating that the products in the cart are selling
out quickly. In our data set, we found a total of 47 instances of the High-demand dark pattern; 38
of these instances appeared consistently, regardless of the product displayed on the website, or
regardless of the items in cart. As with Low-stock Messages, we classify High-demand Messages as
partially covert.
5.1.6 Obstruction. ‘Obstruction’, coined by Gray et al. [48], refers to the category of dark patterns
that make a certain action harder than it should be in order to dissuade users from taking that
action. We observed one type of the Obstruction dark pattern: ‘Hard to Cancel’—a pattern similar
to Brignull’s Roach Motel dark pattern [32]—on 31 websites. Obstruction makes it easy for users to
sign up for recurring subscriptions and memberships, but it makes it hard for them to subsequently
cancel the subscriptions.
More often than not, shopping websites did not disclose upfront to users that canceling the
subscription or membership could not be completed in the same manner they signed up for the
memberships in the first place. For example, as shown in Figure 8a, sportsmansguide.com pro-
motes a ‘buyer’s club’ discount membership price and makes it easy for users to sign up for the
annual recurring membership, as they are under the impression they can ‘cancel anytime.’ However,
sportsmansguide.com’s terms of service reveal that the membership can only be cancelled by call-
ing their customer service. In rare instances, as shown in Figure 8b, websites such as savagex.com
disclosed upfront that cancellation required calling customer service.
Using our taxonomy of dark pattern characteristics, we classify Hard to Cancel as restrictive (it
limits the choices users can exercise to cancel their services) in nature. In cases where websites do
(a) Forced Enrollment on musiciansfriend.com. (b) Forced Enrollment on therealreal.com. Browsing

Agreeing to the terms of use also requires agreeing the website requires creating an account even without
to receive emails and promotions. making a purchase.
Fig. 9. The Forced Enrollment type from the Forced Action category of dark patterns.
not disclose their cancellation policies upfront, Hard to Cancel also becomes information hiding (it
fails to inform users about how cancellation is harder than signing up) in nature.
5.1.7 Forced Action. ‘Forced Action’ refers to the category of dark patterns—originally proposed by
Gray et al. [48]—that require users to take certain additional and tangential actions to complete their
tasks. We observed one type of the Forced Action dark pattern, ‘Forced Enrollment’, on 6 websites.
This type of dark pattern explicitly coerces users into signing up for marketing communication, or
creates accounts to surrender users’ information. By using the Forced Enrollment dark pattern,
online services and websites collected more information about their users than they might otherwise
consent to—resulting from an all-or-nothing proposition.
On four out of six websites, the Forced Enrollment dark pattern manifested as a checkbox
in the user interface, requiring users to simultaneously consent to the terms of service and to
receiving marketing emails as part of the consent process. Figure 9a shows one such instance on
musiciansfriend.com. In another instance of the Forced Enrollment on therealreal.com—as
shown in Figure 9b—the website displayed a popup dialog that prevented users from viewing
product offerings on the website without creating an account—even if users eventually decide
against making a purchase.
Using our taxonomy of dark pattern characteristics, we classify Forced Enrollment as asymmetric
(it requires competing the additional, tangential tasks, creating unequal choices) and restrictive (it
mandates enrolling in marketing communication or creating accounts) in nature.
5.2 Dark Patterns as A Third-Party Service: A Case Study Of Social Proof Activity
Notifications
In many instances, third-party entities—i.e., organizations and companies other than the shopping
websites themselves—were responsible for creating and presenting dark patterns on behalf of the
shopping websites. We observed this frequently to be the case for one dark pattern in particular:
Social Proof Activity Notifications (Section 5.1.4). In this section, we shed light on the ecosystem of
third parties that enable Social Proof Activity Notifications, using our starting point as the list of
websites in our data set that displayed such Activity Notifications.
5.2.1 Detecting Third-party Entities. In order to detect third-party entities, it is sufficient to uncover
scripts that are served from third-party domains and are responsible for creating Social Proof
Activity Notifications. However, automatically attributing certain interface elements and webpage
modifications to third-party scripts constitutes a more challenging task because modern browsers
do not expose any means to attribute DOM changes (e.g. displaying a popup dialog) to particular
scripts. Further, web pages may be modified by several different first and third-party scripts in the
same visit, making attribution trickier.
To overcome this challenge, we employed a combination of automated and manual analyses. We
used the following observation: when a third-party entity displays an Activity Notification on a
shopping website, its content should be included in the HTTP response received from this third
party’s servers on that website. For example, if the notification states ‘Jane from Washington, DC
just purchased this product’, looking up the customer name and location—in this case ‘Jane’ and
‘Washington, DC’—in the HAR file for that website should reveal the end point of the server that
issued the notification. Thus, for all notifications of this kind, we extracted the name and location
pairs from the content, searched the HAR files for these pairs; where successful, we recorded the
HTTP endpoints corresponding to the third-parties. We then manually verified these endpoints
and determined the responsible entities by using the WHOIS database, visiting the script domains
and using search engines to uncover the company identities and websites.
Where this analysis failed to return an HTTP endpoint from the HAR files, and for all other
kinds of Social Proof Activity Notification (e.g., ‘This product was added to cart 10 times in the last
day’), we manually visited the websites containing the message to determine the responsible third
parties. We sped up this analysis using Google Chrome Developer Tool’s ‘DOM change breakpoints’
feature [16], which helped us easily determine the responsible entities.
Having determined the third-party entities, we measured their prevalence across all the shopping
websites in our data set. To do so, we searched the HTTP request data from checkout crawls for the
third-party domains we identified. Finally, as a reference point, we also determined their prevalence
on the web—beyond shopping websites—using the latest publicly available crawl data (November
2018) from the Princeton Web Census Project [7, 40]. This public project documents the prevalence
of third-party scripts using periodic scans of home pages of Alexa top million sites and is available
for external researchers to use.
5.2.2 The Ecosystem Of Third-party Entities. Table 2 summarizes our findings. We discovered a
total of 22 third-party entities, embedded in 1,066 of the 11K shopping websites in our data set, and
in 7,769 of the Alexa top million websites. We note that the prevalence figures from the Princeton
Web Census Project data should be taken as a lower bound since their crawls are limited to home
pages of websites. This difference in prevalence is particularly visible for certain third-party entities
like Qubit and Taggstar, where their prevalence is higher in our data set compared to the Web
Census data. By manually examining websites that contained these third parties, we discovered that
many shopping websites only embedded them in their product—and not home—pages, presumably
for functionality and performance reasons.
We learned that many third-party entities offered a variety of services for shopping websites,
including plugins for popular e-commerce platforms such as Shopify10 and Woocommerce11 . To
better understand the nature and capabilities of each third-party entity, we examined any publicly
available marketing materials on their websites.
Broadly, we could classify the third-party entities into two groups. The first group exclusively
provided Social Proof Activity Notifications integration as a service. The second group provided a
wider array of marketing services that often enabled other types of dark patterns; most commonly
10 https://shopify.com
11 https://woocommerce.com
Table 2. List and prevalence of Social Proof Activity Notifications enabling third-party entities in our data
set of 11K shopping websites and the home pages of Alexa top million websites [7]. Where available, we list
additional dark patterns the third parties claim to offer. Nice/Bizzy, Woocommerce Notification, Boost, and
Amasty are Shopify, Woocommerce, Wordpress and Magento plugins respectively.
Third-party Prevalence Additional Dark

Entity # Shopping # Alexa Top Patterns
Websites Million
Beeketing 406 4,151 Pressured Selling, Urgency, Scarcity
Dynamic Yield 114 416 Urgency
Yieldify 111 323 Urgency, Scarcity
Fomo 91 663 –
Fresh Relevance 86 208 Urgency
Insider 52 484 Scarcity, Urgency
Bizzy 33 213 –
ConvertCart 31 62 –
Taggstar 27 4 Scarcity, Urgency
Qubit 25 73 Pressured Selling, Scarcity, Urgency
Exponea 18 180 Urgency, Scarcity
Recently 14 66 –
Proof 11 508 –
Fera 11 132 Pressured Selling, Scarcity, Urgency
Nice 10 80 –
Woocommerce Notification 10 61 –
Bunting 5 17 Urgency, Scarcity
Credibly 4 67 –
Convertize 3 58 Scarcity, Urgency
LeanConvert 2 0 –
Boost 1 3 –
Amasty 1 0 Pressured Selling, Scarcity, Urgency
these were Scarcity and Urgency dark patterns. We list all these additional dark pattern capabilities
in the rightmost column of Table 2.
Many of the third-parties advertised practices that appeared to be—and sometimes unambiguously
were—manipulative: ‘[p]lay upon [customers’] fear of missing out by showing shoppers which
products are creating a buzz on your website’ (Fresh Relevance), ‘[c]reate a sense of urgency to
boost conversions and speed up sales cycles with Price Alert Web Push’ (Insider), ‘[t]ake advantage
of impulse purchases or encourage visitors over shipping thresholds’ (Qubit). Further, Qubit also
advertised Social Proof Activity Notifications that could be tailored to users’ preferences and
backgrounds.
In some instances, we found that third parties openly advertised the deceptive capabilities of their
products. For example, Boost dedicated a web page—titled ‘Fake it till you make it’—to describing
how it could help create fake orders [12]. Woocommerce Notification—a Woocommerce platform
plugin—also advertised that it could create fake social proof messages: ‘[t]he plugin will create fake
orders of the selected products’ [24]. Interestingly, certain third parties (Fomo, Proof, and Boost)
used Activity Notifications on their websites to promote their own products.
Finally, we also discovered that some of these deceptive practices resulted in e-commerce plat-
forms taking action against third-party entities. For instance, Beeketing’s—the most popular third
This is an instance of Dark Pattern

called ‘Countdown Timer’. The timer
might be fake. Click to learn more.
Fig. 10. Mockup of a possible browser extension that can be developed using our data set. The extension
flags instances of dark patterns with a red warning icon. By hovering over the icon, the user can learn more
about the specific pattern.
party provider in our data set—‘Sales Pop’ Shopify plugin was temporarily removed from Shopify in
an effort to crack down on deceptive practices [67, 76]. The plugin had allowed websites to create
fake Activity Notifications by entering fabricated sales data.
In summary, we discovered that third party entities widely enable dark patterns on shopping
websites. Furthermore, some of these third-parties even advertised the deceptive use of their
services.
6 DISCUSSION
6.1 Dark Patterns and Implications For Consumers
Many dark patterns constitute manipulative and deceptive practices that past work has shown
users are increasingly becoming aware of [36]. Our current data set of dark patterns, comprising
of screenshots and text segments, can be used to build countermeasures to help users make more
informed decisions even in the presence of dark patterns. One such countermeasure could be a
public-facing website that scores shopping websites based on their use of dark patterns. Our data
set can also enable the development of browser extensions that automatically detect and flag dark
patterns (e.g., shopping websites, as shown in Figure 10). Such a tool could be augmented to flag
dark patterns on websites not in our data set through users’ submissions, through community-
generated and maintained lists (similar to how ad blockers work [26]), or through trained machine
learning classifiers. Eventually, such tools could be integrated into browsers themselves. For
example, in recent years, Firefox and Safari have shown interest in integrating tools that promote
consumer privacy (e.g., features to block web tracking by default [66, 82]). However, finding the
right incentives for browser vendors to implement these solutions might be challenging in the
context of dark patterns, since they might be wary of policing content on the web. Finally, future
studies could leverage our descriptive and comparative taxonomy of dark pattern characteristics to
better understand their effects on users, as well as to ascertain which dark patterns are considered
most egregious by users (e.g., by means of users studies).
6.2 Implications for Consumer Protection Policy and Retailers

Our results demonstrate that a number of shopping websites use deceptive dark patterns, involving
affirmative and false representations to consumers. We also found 22 different third-party entities
that enable the creation of Social Proof Activity Notification dark patterns. Some of these entities
promote blatantly deceptive practices and provide the infrastructure for retailers to use these
practices to influence consumer behavior for profit. These practices are unambiguously unlawful in
the United States (under Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act and similar state laws [45]),
and the European Union (under the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive and similar member
state laws [42]).
We also find practices that are unlawful in a smaller set of jurisdictions. In the European Union,
businesses are bound by an array of affirmative disclosure and independent consent requirements in
the Consumer Rights Directive [43]. Websites that use the Sneaking dark patterns (Sneak into Basket,
Hidden Subscription, and Hidden Costs) on European Union consumers are likely in violation of
the Directive. Furthermore, user consent obtained through Trick Questions and Visual Interference
dark patterns do not constitute freely given, informed and active consent as required by the General
Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) [44]. In fact, the Norwegian Consumer Council filed a GDPR
complaint against Google in 2018, arguing that Google used dark patterns to manipulate users
into turning on the ‘Location History’ feature on Android, and thus enabling constant location
tracking [47].
In addition to demonstrating specific instances of unlawful business practices, we contribute a
new approach for regulatory agencies and other consumer protection stakeholders (e.g., journalists
and civil society groups) to detect dark patterns. The crawling and clustering methodology that
we developed is readily generalizable, and it radically reduces the difficulty of discovering and
measuring dark patterns at web scale. Furthermore, our data set of third-party entities which
provide the infrastructure to enable certain deceptive dark patterns can be used by regulators as a
starting point to inform policy and regulation around what kinds of practices should be allowable
in the context online shopping.
6.3 Dark Patterns and Future Studies At Scale

We created automated techniques that can be used to conduct measurements of dark patterns at
web scale. Researchers can extend our tools and infrastructure to document the presence of dark
patterns other types of websites (e.g., travel and ticket booking websites) by building a crawler
that traverses users’ primary interaction paths on those websites. Researchers can also extend our
techniques to measure dark patterns that are not inherently dark because of the text they display
but because they take advantage of visual elements. For example, urgency can be created by a
blinking timer; similarly, Hidden Subscriptions can make the default option (e.g., subscribing to
a paid service) visually more appealing and noticeable than its alternative (e.g., not subscribing).
One starting point to detect such interfaces could be to incorporate style and color as features for
clustering, or even use the design mining literature [39, 56, 59] to analyze specific types of interfaces
(e.g., page headers) in isolation. Finally, researchers can leverage our descriptive taxonomy of dark
pattern characteristics to study and analyze dark patterns in other domains, such as emails and
mobile applications.
6.4 Limitations
Our research has several limitations. First, we only take into account text-based dark patterns and,
therefore, leave out those that are inherently visual (e.g., using font size or color to emphasize one
part of the text more than another). Second, many of the dark patterns we document are derived
from the existing dark patterns literature. However, some of these are exist in a gray area, and in
those cases determining whether a dark pattern is deliberately misleading or not can sometimes be
hard to discern. Opinions of dark patterns may also vary between and among experts and users (e.g.,
countdown timers to indicate when to order to be eligible for free shipping). Clarifying this gray
area and establishing the degree to which these patterns are perceived as manipulative by users can
be further investigated by future user studies. Third, in Section 3 we drew connections between
each type of dark pattern and a set of cognitive biases it exploits. However, these connections may
be more nuanced or complex. For example, not all individuals may be equally susceptible to these
cognitive biases; some individuals may be more susceptible to one kind over another. Fourth, during
our crawls we experienced a small number of Selenium crashes, which did not allow us to either
retrieve product pages or complete data collection on certain websites. Fifth, while the crawler was
mostly effective in simulating user actions, it failed to complete the product purchase flow on some
websites (see Section 4). Sixth, and finally, we only crawled product pages and checkout pages,
missing out on dark patterns commonly present in other pages, such as the home page, product
search, and account creation pages. Many dark patterns also appear after purchase (e.g., upselling)
which our crawler fails to capture because we do not make purchases. Future studies could consider
collecting these kinds of dark patterns from users.
7 CONCLUSION
In this paper, we developed automated techniques to study dark patterns on the web at scale.
By simulating user actions on the ∼11K most popular shopping websites, we collected text and
screenshots of these websites to identify their use of dark patterns. We defined and characterized
these dark patterns, describing how they affect users’ decisions by linking our definitions to the
cognitive biases leveraged by dark patterns. We found at least one instance of dark pattern on
approximately 11.1% of the examined websites. Notably, 183 of the websites displayed deceptive
messages. Furthermore, we observed that dark patterns are more likely to appear on popular
websites. Finally, we discovered that dark patterns are often enabled by third-party entities, of
which we identify 22; two of these advertise practices that enable deceptive patterns. Based on these
findings, we suggest that future work focuses on empirically evaluating the effects of dark patterns
on user behavior, developing countermeasures against dark patterns so that users have a fair and
transparent experience, and extending our work to discover dark patterns in other domains.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We are grateful to Mihir Kshirsagar, Finn Myrstad, Vincent Toubiana, and Joe Calandrino for
feedback on this paper.
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A APPENDIX
Table 3. Confusion Matrices From Our Evaluation of Alexa’s and Webshrinker’s Website Classifiers.
Alexa Prediction Webshrinker Prediction

Not Shopping Shopping Not Shopping Shopping
Truth
Not Shopping 442 1 423 20
Shopping 53 4 10 47
Fig. 11. An illustration of the page segmentation algorithm. The page is segmented into smaller meaningful
“building blocks” or segments. Only segments containing text are recorded.
Algorithm 1 Page Segmentation

1: iдnoredElements ← [‘script’, ‘style’, ‘noscript’, ‘br’, ‘hr’]
2: blockElements ← [‘div’, ‘section’, ‘article’, ‘aside’, ‘nav’, ‘header’, ‘footer’, ‘main’, ‘form’, ‘field-
set’, ‘table’]
3:
4: function segments(element) ▷ Returns a list of segments
5: if not element then
6: return empty list
7: end if
8: taд ← element .taдN ame
9: if taд in iдnoredElements or element not visible or element not bigger than 1 pixel then
11: end if
12: if taд in blockElements then
13: if element does not contain visible blockElements then
14: if all of element’s children in iдnoredElements then
16: else
17: if element occupies more than 30% of the page then
18: return list of seдments(child) for each child in element’s children
19: else
20: return [element]
21: end if
22: end if
23: else if element contains text nodes then
25: else
27: end if
28: else
29: if element has at least one child with taд in blockElements then
31: else
32: if element occupies more than 30% of the page then
34: else
36: end if
37: end if
38: end if
39: end function
Received April 2019; revised June 2019; accepted August 2019

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Dark Patterns at Scale: Findings from a Crawl of 11K

ARUNESH MATHUR, Princeton University, USA

GUNES ACAR, Princeton University, USA

ACM Reference Format:

2.2 Dark Patterns in User Interface Design

2.3 Comparison to Prior Work

3 A TAXONOMY OF DARK PATTERN CHARACTERISTICS

4.1 Creating a Corpus of Shopping Websites

4.2 Data Collection with a Website Crawl

Webshrinker polyglot Language

361K Websites From 47K Shopping 19K English

Product Page 53K Product Pages

4.3 Data Analysis with Clustering

0e+00 1e+05 2e+05 3e+05 4e+05

4.4 Detecting Deceptive Dark Patterns

5.1 Categories of Dark Patterns

Fig. 3. Three types of the Sneaking category of dark patterns.

Fig. 4. Two types of the Urgency category of dark patterns.

Fig. 5. Four types of the Misdirection category of dark patterns.

Using our taxonomy of dark pattern characteristics, we classify Confirmshaming as asymmetric

(c) Activity Notification on jcpenney.com. The (d) Testimonials of Uncertain Origin on

Fig. 6. Two types of the Social Proof category of dark patterns.

(b) Low-stock on orthofeet (c) High-demand Message on fashionnova.com.

Fig. 7. Two types of the Scarcity category of dark patterns.

(b) Hard to Cancel on savagex.com. The website discloses

(a) Forced Enrollment on musiciansfriend.com. (b) Forced Enrollment on therealreal.com. Browsing

Third-party Prevalence Additional Dark

This is an instance of Dark Pattern

6.2 Implications for Consumer Protection Policy and Retailers

6.3 Dark Patterns and Future Studies At Scale

[13] 2019. .har - Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.har Accessed March 12, 2019.

Alexa Prediction Webshrinker Prediction

Not Shopping 442 1 423 20

Algorithm 1 Page Segmentation

Received April 2019; revised June 2019; accepted August 2019

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