Awareness and Empowerment: A Review of Deceptive Design and Interventions

This paper discusses the progress the User Experience(UX) design community has made in making users aware of dark patterns and what actions it has taken to remove them. It also looks at the legal side of the conversation to see how laws are implemented to tackle this problem. We explore how these patterns affect everyone from young children to adults, and why simple awareness or higher prices do not stop them from working. The review looks at the shift toward active empowerment, such as new technical tools that let users block deceptive designs themselves. It also looks at how mild tricks allow companies to avoid a negative reputation while still manipulating users. Finally, we discuss how internal company goals drive these designs and why we need a legal and a digital system where fairness is built into the design from the start to protect people from these manipulative tactics including the new, hyper-personalized artificial intelligent(AI) traps.