Tales from the Dark Side

On 20.07.2014 we presented our work on Privacy Dark Patterns at the PETS Symposium 2016 to an audience of international experts in the field. The corresponding Paper "Tales from the Dark Side: Privacy Dark Strategies and Privacy Dark Patterns" is published in the Journal "Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PoPETs)". We investigate, what kind of patterns can be identified where privacy is intentionally violated in the Internet of in smartphone apps. A simple example are mandatory form fields that request user information without being actually necessary for the purpose of a service. In cooperation with the department of psychology, we also discuss why such strategies and mechanisms are effective with humans. This work, thereby, also constitutes a first result of our cooperation with colleagues from psychology on the topic of privacy.