About the Book
This book provides essential insights on dark patterns and AI-powered deceptive design for anyone who wants to understand and challenge the pervasive influence of these hidden forces shaping our digital experiences.
These hidden design strategies – from personalised user interface triggers to sophisticated backend systems – are often used to manipulate user behaviour in ways that benefit businesses at the expense of users. With advanced profiling driven by AI, these deceptive techniques can tailor digital environments to each user, raising significant questions about privacy, control and the boundaries of digital design.
The book examines the response of regulators, from the GDPR, Digital Services Act and AI Act in the EU to emerging frameworks in the USA, Brazil and India. Through real-world examples, it explains how these laws fail to address deceptive design practices and explores the implications for privacy, autonomy and consumer protection in the digital age.
By uncovering the complex layers of modern deceptive design, the book equips readers with the knowledge to recognise these tactics and consider their impact on user choice and trust. It is essential reading for legal professionals, digital rights advocates, designers, and anyone invested in fair digital practices.
Dark Patterns, Deceptive Design, and the Law is also available in audiobook format from audiobook retailers.
Table of Contents:
Preface
Part I: Dark, Darker, and Darkest Patterns
1. A Frightening Future Awaits, Unless...
2. Deceptive Techniques and their Associated Harms
3. Regulatory Responses to Dark Patterns and Deceptive Design
4. Emerging Digital Design Laws and Regulations
Part II: Manipulation Beneath the Interface
5. System Architecture Patterns and the Personalisation of Exploitation
6. AI-Powered Deceptive Design
7. The Illusion of Control: Who is Truly Vulnerable?
Part III: The Fight Against Dark Patterns and Deceptive Design
8. Toward a Future Free of Manipulation
Afterword: Reflections on the Ride
About the Author :
MR Leiser, formerly of Vrije Universiteit-Amsterdam and Leiden University, the Netherlands, is an expert specialising in digital, legal, and platform regulation.
Review :
Tene and Polonetsky expounded a Theory of Creepy in 2013. Dr Leiser’s book shows today how well beyond creepy and even overshooting downright sneaky many digital services are by design today. His book lays out in stark terms the real harms, including of financial loss and a dangerous erosion of trust and autonomy, that ensue from the digital manipulation to which we are daily subject. Children and more vulnerable internet users are the most adversely affected.
Dr Leiser’s text is a timely and accessible illumination of the issue of deceptive design in digital services that provides up-to-date and expanded language to describe the range of “dark patterns” phenomena we sometimes can’t see but experience. He carefully illustrates the challenges globally these issues present for enforcement as they cut through and sometimes find gaps in consumer, data protection, privacy and sectoral laws. The book thoughtfully proposes realistic and layered solutions which are all the more urgent given the now turbocharging effects of AI. This book is a very important opportunity to act and change course and to do so right now.
Dr Mark Leiser’s Dark Patterns, Deceptive Design, and the Law is a masterful examination of one of the most insidious threats in our digital age. With a keen eye for both regulatory nuance and the deeper structural manipulations at play, Leiser moves beyond the surface-level discussion of dark patterns to reveal how deception is embedded not just in user interfaces, but in the very architecture of our digital experiences. This book is an essential resource for scholars, regulators, and anyone concerned with deceptive design and AI. Leiser’s work stands as a compelling call to action, urging us to challenge the AI systems that shape—and too often exploit—our online lives.
Dr Leiser engages clearly and insightfully with the topic of dark patterns. This book is informative and transformative through a multifaceted approach to the subject. It challenges readers to rethink their perspectives and the implications of deceptive design—in the user interface and beneath the surface in the system architecture.
Dark patterns are complex, hidden, and harmful. They are a mix of design, both of user interfaces and platforms, psychology, and exploitation of legal and regulatory gaps. As a result, to understand dark patterns, and how to regulate for them, requires an understanding of how people think, how systems “nudge” and influence us, and what the legal-regulatory framework is. Fortunately, Dr. Mark Leiser brings all these together and this book, which is the culmination of many years researching dark patterns and how to regulate them, is his universal resource for anyone encountering this subject whether it is for the first time or if they are already familiar with the challenges. It should be read by academics, lawyers or anyone interested in the subject, it ought to be read by designers of platforms and interfaces, it must be read by regulators. This book makes a vital contribution to a subject that is unfortunately familiar to us all.
Professor Mark Leiser is nailing it in his upcoming book. Writing about dark patterns has never been easy, especially given the complex and often inadequate regulatory framework. Age-old sales tactics, now paired with sophisticated algorithms and advanced UX design, make consumers more vulnerable than ever. As companies continually reinvent the wheel with innovative tools, applying traditional legal approaches becomes increasingly challenging. This new book is a must-read for anyone seeking to understand the core issues surrounding dark patterns and how to address them.
An incisive and assured account of the ways in which commercial design shapes our choices, and our ability to choose. Required reading for anyone working on autonomy, and the construction of the self in the digital age.
If we consider the users of digital goods and services as weaker parties in their relations with the mighty platforms, then the noble task of defending them belongs also to academics and dr. Leiser has the privilege to be the first expert who offers a very accurate examination of both legal aspects and technical details regarding the dark patterns and his book, while pushing further the frontier of scientific knowledge in this delicate, yet important area of consumer world, is also an invitation to his fellow colleagues to continue the search for adequate remedies.
It sometimes appears as if we are taking it for granted: in our digital lives we are continuously being manipulated by businesses to spend our time and money in ways that serve their interests, often not our own. In his new book “Dark Patterns, Deceptive Design, and the Law” Mark Leiser dissects those practices with surgical precision. Rooted in scientific research, the book shows how dark patterns work and how they are recently being supercharged by the use of AI. It elaborates on the harms caused by dark patterns and on the insidious ways that dark patterns increasingly operate under the surface of our digital landscapes, making most people not only unaware but also defenseless against them. Particularly people who are more vulnerable than most, but also those who think they cannot be fooled.
True to his nature as a legal scholar, Mark skillfully places dark patterns in the current European legal framework, assessing the application of various laws. He concludes with a comprehensive reflection on what is required to make online interfaces fair to people.
This book is a must-read for digital entrepreneurs, UX-designers, legal compliance offers, politicians and policy makers as well as enforcers. It will certainly also enrich those that are interested in understanding how the digital transformation impacts us all and how we need to ensure that the developments continue to serve society as a whole.
