This is a release of the data and code for the research paper "Dark Patterns at Scale: Findings from a Crawl of 11K Shopping Websites". The paper will appear at the ACM Computer Supported Collaborative Work and Social Computing (CSCW) 2019 conference.
Authors: Arunesh Mathur, Gunes Acar, Michael Friedman, Elena Lucherini, Jonathan Mayer, Marshini Chetty, Arvind Narayanan.
Paper: Available on arXiv.
Website: https://webtransparency.cs.princeton.edu/dark-patterns
The repository has three primary components:
-
src/
: Contains code for generating the list of shopping websites, the product page classifier, and the checkout crawler (based on OpenWPM, insidecrawler/
). -
data/
: Contains the list of shopping websites, product pages, output of the clustering analysis, and the final list of dark patterns. -
analysis/
: Contains code for running the clustering analysis, long-term deceptive analysis of certain kinds of dark patterns, third-party prevalence analysis, and statistics about the dark patterns.
The data from the checkout crawls can be downloaded here.
Please use the following BibTeX to cite our paper:
@article{Mathur2019DarkPatterns,
title = {Dark Patterns at Scale: Findings from a Crawl of 11K Shopping Websites},
author = {Mathur, Arunesh and Acar, Gunes and Friedman, Michael and Lucherini, Elena and Mayer, Jonathan and Chetty, Marshini and Narayanan, Arvind},
year = 2019,
journal = {Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact.},
publisher = {ACM},
volume = 1,
number = {CSCW},
issue_date = {November 2019}
}
We are grateful to the developers of the following projects:
Please see the license file.