Richard Whittle receives funding from the ESRC, Research England, and various industry sources including AJ Bell and the Money Advice Service. The research mentioned in this article was supported by ...

People are spending more than intended online because of manipulative website techniques, research from Consumer has found.

You’ve seen them before. Pop-ups with tiny X’s that make a window hard to close. Buttons and toggles in permissions boxes that are so confusing it’s difficult to understand what you’re agreeing to.

Tactics like countdown timers and messages showing items fast running out stock when buying things online are being labelled insidious.

The term “dark patterns” may be new to you, but the experience certainly isn’t. You encounter dark patterns online every day: the confusing questions that get you to opt into invasive data collection; ...

A large-scale academic study that analyzed more than 53,000 product pages on more than 11,000 online stores found widespread use of user interface "dark patterns"-- practices meant to mislead ...