Dark patterns is a term used to describe the way companies deceive users by design to give away as much personal data as possible, in order to benefit themselves. Previous studies have shown that the presence of dark patterns is very common on websites as well as in mobile applications. As the web and broadband companies collect a lot of data from web users, virtual private network (VPN) software has become commonly used to protect online users’ privacy. No previous studies have examined VPN services in this context. This report therefore examines VPN providers’ software and websites through content analysis, to determine if dark patterns are present in their user interfaces and information presented to the users and if so, in what way dark patterns are present. The result of this study shows that dark patterns were present on all VPN providers’ websites that were examined and one of the websites made it particularly difficult to delete user accounts and their related data. It is questionable whether all personal data gets removed after an account deletion request has been made by the user, since users have to give away more personal data in exchange to submit the deletion request, thus making personal data a tradeoff.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:hb-28567 |
| Date | January 2022 |
| Creators | Dao, Xi Hoa |
| Publisher | Högskolan i Borås, Akademin för bibliotek, information, pedagogik och IT |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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