Looking Beyond the Privacy Policy: Regulatory Scrutiny of Dark Patterns in User Interfaces

Privacy regulators are increasingly looking beyond a company’s privacy policy to scrutinize the user interface of its websites, apps, and other online services, and challenging designs that they view as manipulating consumer choice. In this pursuit, regulators and privacy advocates increasingly utilize the term “dark patterns” as an umbrella concept to describe the wide array of activities that may be considered manipulative design in user interfaces. The “dark patterns” concept also p