Acceso usuarios
Fabiana Di Porto, Alexander Egberts
Dark Patterns are interface design elements that can influence users' behaviour in digital environ-ments. They can cause harm, not only on an individual but also a collective level, by creating behav-ioral market failures, reducing trust in markets and promoting unfair competition and datadominance. We contend that these collective effects of Dark Patterns cannot be tackled by existentlaws, and thus call for policy intervention. This article reviews how existing and proposed laws inEurope and the US, namely the EU Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act as well as theU.S. DETOUR and AICO Acts, address these collective dimensions of welfare and add to existingprotection. We find that the novel legislative measures attain that goal to varying degrees. However,the collective welfare perspective may prove useful to both support a risk-based approach to theenforcement and provide guidance as to which practices should be addressed as priority.
