Gunes Acar gives training on Dark Patterns to European consumer protection authorities

Date of news: 16 September 2021

Gunes Acar, who recently joined as an assistant professor, gave a seminar on Dark Patterns to over 40 members of European consumer protection authorities. The seminar covered areas such as challenges of identifying dark patterns at scale, and tools available to authorities for large-scale investigations. The seminar also included a presentation of an influential 2019 paper Acar co-authored: "Dark Patterns at Scale: Findings from a Crawl of 11K Shopping Websites".

The seminar was given within the e-enforcement academy project of the European Commission. The goal of the e-enforcement academy is to improve the ability of authorities within the Consumer Protection Cooperation Network (CPC) to conduct online investigations. Acar was joined in the seminar by Constanta Rosca of Maastricht University, who specializes in lawfulness of dark patterns within the EU legal framework.