CHICAGO, Nov. 28 (Xinhua) -- Researchers from the University of Chicago and Princeton University have found that "dark patterns" on shopping websites are startlingly common, appearing on more than one out of 10 sites and used frequently by many of the most popular online merchants.

The study built a web-crawling tool to analyze more than 50,000 product pages from 11,000 shopping sites. By grabbing the text from these pages, the researchers could look for both known and new "dark patterns," as well as measure how frequently they appear. In total, they found more than 1,800 instances of dark pattern usage on 1,254 websites, according to a news release posted on the University of Chicago's website this week.

On a subset of 183 online shopping websites, the researchers found these patterns were outright deceptive. Some commonly used tricks on this subset of websites included countdown timers for "limited-time" sales that reset every time the user reloaded the page, faked customer testimonials, low-stock or high-demand notifications that appear on a recurring schedule, and messages or layouts that pressure consumers to buy higher-cost items.

By looking at the computer code behind these website elements, the researchers found third-party services that provide these options to shopping websites, enabling dark patterns to proliferate as easy-to-install plugins.

To help consumers recognize these misleading practices, the researchers created a website to raise awareness of different dark patterns. They have also discussed their findings with the Federal Trade Commission -- the government agency charged with regulating deceptive retail practices -- and provided information to the sponsors of the Deceptive Experiences To Online Users Reduction Act, introduced in the U.S. Senate earlier this year.

"Dark patterns are basically tactics a user interface design uses to lead a user down a certain path for the benefit of the service provider," said the paper's co-author Marshini Chetty, assistant professor of computer science at the University of Chicago. "Often, it's trying to get the user to make a decision that they may not have made if they were otherwise fully informed."

"It wasn't the goal of the work to name and shame people... We wanted to get a sense of: Is this a problem, and should we be doing something about it? Then the government can pass legislation that would make it very difficult for service providers to use certain dark patterns, particularly those that try to trick users into giving up information or that are directed at children," Chetty said. Enditem

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