This study examines the extent of which older internet users can identify dark patterns in e-commerce sites. The purpose of this is to understand which types of dark patterns that older people 55+ can identify to which degree after receiving adequate knowledge about the subject of deceptive design and specifically dark patterns, and also if there is any connection between the results and factors such as demographic differences and the communicative nature of each dark pattern. This study shows the type of dark patterns that was identified correctly the most by the respondents was Low-stock message, which we categorized as having linguistic communicative attributes. The least correctly identified type of dark patterns was Aesthetic manipulation with its graphic communicative nature. Over all the respondents were able to identify dark patterns correctly to an extent of 50 %, and no distinctive demographic patterns relating to the outcome were found other than that higher education seemed to equal higher results. Regarding how the communicative attributes of each dark pattern affected the respondents' results, we did find that dark patterns of linguistic type were easier for the respondents to identify, whereas graphical dark patterns were the hardest. To gather the data a web-based survey was used and distributed through Facebook which generated 28 respondents in total. The data was then analyzed using frequency tables and simple descriptive statistics, and some of them were later translated into diagrams to visualize the results in an effective way.

This study aims to address whether Swedish e-commerce websites use dark patterns in cookies and, if so, how they do it and what users think is ethically acceptable regarding this matter. Previous research has mainly focused on identifying dark patterns and the user experience aspect of cookies and dark patterns. In this study, a framework based on definitions of dark patterns from Brignull (u.å.b) and Forbrukerrådet (2018), was used to identify dark patterns in cookies through a content analysis on 30 of the e-commerce websites in Sweden with the highest economic turnover. What users consider to be ethically acceptable is examined through a survey with a total of 111 respondents. The results show that dark patterns are used to a large extent on Swedish e-commerce websites and out of eight examined dark patterns, an average of five dark patterns per website were identified. The results also indicate that the majority of users thought that dark patterns in cookies are ethically unacceptable, even though a certain part of the respondents also seemed to be more neutral set in the matter.