In June, a team of researchers from Princeton and the University of Chicago were the first to catalog how hundreds of e-commerce sites use these methods. The researchers hope their catalog of nearly 2,000 different dark patterns on more than 1,300 different sites will pressure companies to reconsider their practices, and spur regulation.
Members of Princeton’s Web Transparency & Accountability Project (WebTAP) used automated web-crawling programs to assemble a list of the dark patterns the programs could see in a page’s text. Then they classified the dark patterns’ methods systematically.