How Facebook Manipulates You: Dark Patterns Exposed

In today's newsletter, I analyze some of Facebook's dark patterns that affect our privacy.

Dark Patterns in privacy are manipulative design practices that exploit our cognitive biases to make us share more data than we would do if we had more information about what is going on

Watch the 6 minutes video below to learn how Facebook builds its design interface using dark patterns that make users share more data than they would like to. To be updated about my next videos, subscribe to my YouTube channel.

Dark patterns are entering the radar of lawmakers in the United States and in the European Union (EU). Additionally, the EU recently issued a detailed report on dark patterns and manipulative personalization (they cited and used my proposed taxonomy for dark patterns in data protection on pp. 32 and 33). My personal take is that stricter measures against dark patterns will come soon. Companies should get ready to increased scrutiny over their design practices, and should train their professionals to implement privacy in all levels of product development.

I proposed Privacy-Enhancing Design as a framework to curb dark patterns and educate tech professionals (especially designers, product managers and data protection lawyers) on how to implement privacy in the design of products and services.

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See you next week. All the best, Luiza Jarovsky