Ever feel like you’ve been duped into buying a product because you’re worried the 102 others who have it in their cart might take it instead? Or feel like you’ve binge-watched a streaming show because one episode keeps automatically playing after the one you just finished? These online manipulations do happen and are often achieved with intentionally misleading user interfaces, or dark patterns. These manipulative interfaces, sometimes called deceptive designs, effectively steer consumers, like you and I, down certain paths for the gain of the service provider. To overcome these issues, researchers have studied all kinds of dark patterns and policy-makers have begun enacting regulations to better protect consumers against their use and effects. In this talk, I present a range of my own studies on dark patterns that cover how prevalent these interface issues are online, quantify their effects on users, and examine how regulations around dark patterns are being implemented in practice. To conclude, I provide recommendations for future work for researchers, policy-makers, and designers who want to strengthen online consumer protections.
| 11:45am - 12:15pm: | Food and community socializing. |
| 12:15pm - 1:15pm: | Presentation with Q&A. Available hybrid via Zoom. |
| 1:30pm - 2:15pm: | Student meeting with speaker, held in CSE2/Gates 371. Students will walk to this from the seminar. |
Marshini Chetty is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Chicago where she directs the Amyoli Internet Research Laboratory (AIR lab). She specializes in human-computer interaction and usable privacy and security. Her work has won best paper awards at SOUPS, CHI, and CSCW, and she was a co-recipient of the Annual Privacy Papers for Policymakers award. Her research has been featured in the NYTimes, CNN, Wall Street Journal, BBC, Chicago Tribune, The Guardian, WIRED, and Slashdot. She has received generous funding from the National Science Foundation, through grants and an NSF CAREER award, as well as the National Security Agency, Facebook, and multiple Google Faculty Research Awards.