peer reviewed

As voice-enabled technologies are becoming increasingly more prevalent, voice-enabled permission requests become a crucial topic of investigation. It is yet unclear how to appropriately inform users in voice user interfaces (VUIs) about data processing practices. To understand how modality (text vs. voice) and the speech rate of the voice can influence users’ perceptions and decisions to grant permission, we conducted two preregistered studies (N = 343 and N = 594) and one pre-study, including two listening tasks to design potentially deceptive voice patterns. We found that users can distinguish between different levels of intrusiveness in the voice modality. However, they are less likely to accept voice-based permissions, pointing to cognitive problems associated with them. Moreover, we found that speech rate manipulations of action verbs “Accept” and “Decline” shifted users’ decisions towards acceptance, making the effect less controllable than predicted. This work highlights implications and design considerations for future voice-enabled permission requests.

Effectively mitigating online misinformation requires understanding of their mechanisms and learning of practical skills for identification and counteraction. Serious games may serve as tools for combating misinformation, teaching players to recognize common misinformation tactics, and improving their skills of discernment. However, current interventions are designed as single-player, choice-based games, which present players with limited predefined choices. Such restrictions reduce replayability and may lead to an overly simplistic understanding of misinformation and how to debunk them. This study seeks to empower people to understand opinion-influencing and misinformation-debunking processes. We created a Player vs. Player (PvP) game in which participants attempt to generate or debunk misinformation to convince the public opinion represented by LLM. Using a within-subjects mixed-methods study design (N=47), we found that this game significantly raised participants' media literacy and improved their ability to identify misinformation. Qualitative analyses revealed how participants' use of debunking and content creation strategies deepened their understanding of misinformation. This work shows the potential for illuminating contrasting viewpoints of social issues by LLM-based mechanics in PvP games.

Health misinformation, defined as health-oriented information that contradicts empirically supported scientific findings, has become a significant concern on social media platforms. In response, platforms have implemented diverse design solutions to block such misinformation or alert users about its potential inaccuracies. However, there is limited knowledge about users’ perceptions of this specific type of misinformation and the actions that are necessary from both the platforms and the users themselves to mitigate its proliferation. This paper explores social media users’ (n = 22) perceptions of health misinformation. On the basis of our data, we identify specific types of health misinformation and align them with user-suggested countermeasures. We point to the critical demands for anti-misinformation solutions for health topics, emphasizing the transparency of information sources, immediate presentation of information, and clarity. Building on these findings, we propose a series of design recommendations to aid the future development of solutions aimed at counteracting misinformation.

Organizations rely on phishing interventions to enhance employees’ vigilance and safe responses to phishing emails that bypass technical solutions. While various resources are available to counteract phishing, studies emphasize the need for interactive and practical training approaches. To investigate the effectiveness of such an approach, we developed and delivered two anti-phishing trainings, group discussion and role-playing, at a European university. We conducted a pre-registered1 experiment (N = 105), incorporating repeated measures at three time points, a control group, and three in-situ phishing tests. Both trainings enhanced employees’ anti-phishing self-efficacy and support-seeking intention in within-group analyses. Only the role-playing training significantly improved support-seeking intention when compared to the control group. Participants in both trainings reported more phishing tests and demonstrated heightened vigilance to phishing attacks compared to the control group. We discuss practical implications for evaluating and improving phishing interventions and promoting safe responses to phishing threats within organizations.

The privacy engineering literature proposes requirements for the design of technologies but gives little guidance on how to correctly fulfil them in practice. On the other hand, a growing number of taxonomies document examples of how to circumvent privacy requirements via ”dark patterns,” i.e., manipulative privacy-invasive interface designs. To improve the actionability of the knowledge about dark patterns for the privacy engineering community, we matched a selection of existing dark patterns classifications with the ISO/IEC 29100:2011 standard on Privacy Principles by performing an iterative expert analysis, which resulted in clusters of dark patterns that potentially violate the ISO privacy engineering requirements. Our results can be used to develop practical guidelines for the implementation of technology designs that comply with the ISO Privacy Principles.

Manipulative design in user interfaces (conceptualized as dark patterns) has emerged as a significant impediment to the ethical design of technology and a threat to user agency and freedom of choice. While previous research focused on exploring these patterns in the context of graphical user interfaces, the impact of speech has largely been overlooked. We conducted a listening test (N = 50) to elicit participants’ preferences regarding different synthetic voices that varied in terms of synthesis method (concatenative vs. neural) and prosodic qualities (speech pace and pitch variance), and then evaluated their impact in an online decision-making study (N = 101). Our results indicate a significant effect of voice qualities on the participant’s choices, independently from the content of the available options. Our results also indicate that the voice’s perceived engagement, ease of understanding, and domain fit directly translate to its impact on participants’ behavior in decision-making tasks.

Online vendors often deploy limited-time and limited-quantity cues on their e-commerce sites to influence consumers purchase decisions. Although these scarcity cues can reflect genuine restrictions in the availability of goods, they are increasingly considered as ill-intentioned nudges or ‘dark patterns’ due to their omnipresence and success in persuading consumers. In an online experiment (N = 202), we examined the effects of limited-time and limited-quantity cues on perceived task load, perceived benevolence, and user experience. Results suggest that participants associated scarcity cues with a lack of benevolence from online vendors. E-commerce site design without scarcity cues provided participants with a superior hedonic and pragmatic user experience. In the case of limited-time scarcity cues, participants reported frustration-related negative emotions. We discuss the implications of these findings from the perspectives of dark pattern researchers, designers, and online vendors.

• A multidisciplinary mapping of the micro, meso, and macro factors of vulnerability to dark patterns. • A subsequent critical reflection on the feasibility of the risk assessment proposed in the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the Digital Services Act (DSA), and the Artificial Intelligence Act (AI Act). • Multidisciplinary suggestions to increase resilience towards digital manipulative designs. In the last few years, there have been growing concerns about the far-reaching influence that digital architectures may exert on individuals and societies. A specific type of digital manipulation is often engineered into the interfaces of digital services through the use of so-called dark patterns, that cause manifold harms against which nobody seems to be immune. However, many areas of law rely on a traditional class-based view according to which certain groups are inherently more vulnerable than others, such as children. Although the undue influence exerted by dark patterns on online decisions can befall anybody, empirical studies show that there are actually certain factors that aggravate the vulnerability of some people by making them more likely to incur in certain manipulation risks engineered in digital services and less resilient to the related harms. But digital vulnerability does not overlap with traditionally protected groups and depends on multifaceted factors. This article contributes to the ongoing discussions on these topics by offering (i) a multidisciplinary mapping of the micro, meso, and macro factors of vulnerability to dark patterns; (ii) a subsequent critical reflection on the feasibility of the risk assessment proposed in three selected EU legal frameworks: the General Data Protection Regulation, the Digital Services Act, and the Artificial Intelligence Act; (iii) and multidisciplinary suggestions to increase resilience towards manipulative designs online.

Conversational agents (CAs) that deliver proactive interventions can benefit users by reducing their cognitive workload and improving performance. However, little is known regarding how such interventions would impact users’ reflection on choices in voice-only decision-making tasks. We conducted a within-subjects experiment to evaluate the effect of CA’s feedback delivery strategy at three levels (no feedback, unsolicited and solicited feedback) and the impact on users’ likelihood of changing their choices in an interactive food ordering scenario. We discovered that in both feedback conditions the CA was perceived to be significantly more persuasive than in the baseline condition, while being perceived as significantly less confident. Interestingly, while unsolicited feedback was perceived as less appropriate than the baseline, both types of proactive feedback led participants to relisten and reconsider menu options significantly more often. Our results provide insights regarding the impact of proactive feedback on CA perception and user’s reflection in decision-making tasks, thereby paving a new way for designing proactive CAs.

Persuasive tactics intend to encourage users to open advertising emails. However, these tactics can overwhelm users, which makes them frustrated and leads to lower open rates. This paper intends to understand which persuasive tactics are used and how they are perceived by users. We first developed a categorization of inbox-level persuasive tactics in permission-based advertising emails. We then asked participants to interact with an email inbox prototype, combined with interviews (N=32), to investigate their opinions towards advertising emails and underlying persuasive tactics. Our qualitative findings reveal poor user experience with advertising emails, which was related to feeling surveilled by companies, forced subscription, high prior knowledge about persuasive tactics, and a desire for more agency. We also found that using certain persuasive tactics on the inbox level is perceived as ethically inappropriate. Based on these insights, we provide design recommendations to improve advertising communication and make such emails more valuable to users.