The future of anticompetitive self-preferencing: analysis of hypernudging by voice assistants under article 102 TFEU

Tackling Dark Patterns Online. Legal Design IRL: Marie Potel-Saville From Amurabi

Korhonen, Hannele and Potel-Saville, Marie (2023)

This week on Legal Design Thinking IRL, Hannele Korhonen speaks with Marie Potel-Saville. They talk about the dark patterns of the internet, how to identify them and how she’s leveraging legal design to create fair patterns for users. They discuss what dark patterns are, how they affect our everyday lives, how to spot them, why they are bad for businesses, what laws and international standards govern dark patterns, what fair patterns are, how legal design can create fair patterns, why a human-centric approach to users, UX and their interactions with your business is crucial, and how to report dark patterns.

Rosca, Constanta (2023)

Destination ‘Dark Patterns’: On the EU (digital) Legislative Train and Line-Drawing

The concept of dark patterns is still ill-conceptualized in the Digital Services Act, the first EU legislative act to tackle dark patterns head-on. The author identifies these concerning aspects to the DSA's prohibition of dark patterns, notably its reference to manipulation as a source of consumer harm. ‘Manipulation’ is not defined in the regulation, and is a new EU legal term. Many philosophers have reflected on the meaning of manipulation and how it manifests in digital environments, and the jury is still out on this question. This article assesses this and related shortcomings, as well as others in relation to the IMCO Committee's proposed amendment of the Unfair Commercial Patterns Directive to better target dark patterns.