Dark Patterns after the GDPR: Scraping Consent Pop-ups and Demonstrating their Influence
Nouwens first author. A scrape of 680 consent pop-ups from the five most popular platforms across the top 10,000 UK websites found dark patterns and implied consent ubiquitous, with about 12 per cent meeting the authors' minimal reading of European law. A field experiment with 40 participants across the eight commonest designs found banner style made no difference, removing the first-page opt-out raised consent by 22 to 23 percentage points, and granular first-page controls lowered it.
Nouwens first author. A scrape of 680 consent pop-ups from the five most popular platforms across the top 10,000 UK websites found dark patterns and implied consent ubiquitous, with about 12 per cent meeting the authors' minimal reading of European law. A field experiment with 40 participants across the eight commonest designs found banner style made no difference, removing the first-page opt-out raised consent by 22 to 23 percentage points, and granular first-page controls lowered it.
Written from the abstract read 2026-10-18.
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Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1-13. doi:10.1145/3313831.3376321.