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Main Authors: Chen, Jieshan, Sun, Jiamou, Feng, Sidong, Xing, Zhenchang, Lu, Qinghua, Xu, Xiwei, Chen, Chunyang
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.05898
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author Chen, Jieshan
Sun, Jiamou
Feng, Sidong
Xing, Zhenchang
Lu, Qinghua
Xu, Xiwei
Chen, Chunyang
author_facet Chen, Jieshan
Sun, Jiamou
Feng, Sidong
Xing, Zhenchang
Lu, Qinghua
Xu, Xiwei
Chen, Chunyang
contents Mobile apps bring us many conveniences, such as online shopping and communication, but some use malicious designs called dark patterns to trick users into doing things that are not in their best interest. Many works have been done to summarize the taxonomy of these patterns and some have tried to mitigate the problems through various techniques. However, these techniques are either time-consuming, not generalisable or limited to specific patterns. To address these issues, we propose UIGuard, a knowledge-driven system that utilizes computer vision and natural language pattern matching to automatically detect a wide range of dark patterns in mobile UIs. Our system relieves the need for manually creating rules for each new UI/app and covers more types with superior performance. In detail, we integrated existing taxonomies into a consistent one, conducted a characteristic analysis and distilled knowledge from real-world examples and the taxonomy. Our UIGuard consists of two components, Property Extraction and Knowledge-Driven Dark Pattern Checker. We collected the first dark pattern dataset, which contains 4,999 benign UIs and 1,353 malicious UIs of 1,660 instances spanning 1,023 mobile apps. Our system achieves a superior performance in detecting dark patterns (micro averages: 0.82 in precision, 0.77 in recall, 0.79 in F1 score). A user study involving 58 participants further shows that \tool{} significantly increases users' knowledge of dark patterns.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2308_05898
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Unveiling the Tricks: Automated Detection of Dark Patterns in Mobile Applications
Chen, Jieshan
Sun, Jiamou
Feng, Sidong
Xing, Zhenchang
Lu, Qinghua
Xu, Xiwei
Chen, Chunyang
Human-Computer Interaction
Mobile apps bring us many conveniences, such as online shopping and communication, but some use malicious designs called dark patterns to trick users into doing things that are not in their best interest. Many works have been done to summarize the taxonomy of these patterns and some have tried to mitigate the problems through various techniques. However, these techniques are either time-consuming, not generalisable or limited to specific patterns. To address these issues, we propose UIGuard, a knowledge-driven system that utilizes computer vision and natural language pattern matching to automatically detect a wide range of dark patterns in mobile UIs. Our system relieves the need for manually creating rules for each new UI/app and covers more types with superior performance. In detail, we integrated existing taxonomies into a consistent one, conducted a characteristic analysis and distilled knowledge from real-world examples and the taxonomy. Our UIGuard consists of two components, Property Extraction and Knowledge-Driven Dark Pattern Checker. We collected the first dark pattern dataset, which contains 4,999 benign UIs and 1,353 malicious UIs of 1,660 instances spanning 1,023 mobile apps. Our system achieves a superior performance in detecting dark patterns (micro averages: 0.82 in precision, 0.77 in recall, 0.79 in F1 score). A user study involving 58 participants further shows that \tool{} significantly increases users' knowledge of dark patterns.
title Unveiling the Tricks: Automated Detection of Dark Patterns in Mobile Applications
topic Human-Computer Interaction
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.05898