Figure 1: In our study, children (top) and adolescents (bottom) redesigned fair versions of three diferent dialogs that originally asked users to accept notifcations (left), to accept cookies (center), or to watch an ad to continue playing (right).We asked participants to nudge users toward acceptance.Redesigns contained no option to decline (C19), visual nudging (A20), colorful designs (C25, A32), increased wait times (C10), and emotional manipulation (A11).English translations are provided in Figure 5.

Dark patterns are malicious UI design strategies that nudge users towards decisions going against their best interests. To create technical countermeasures against them, dark patterns must be automatically detectable. While researchers have devised algorithms to detect some patterns automatically, there has only been little work to use obtained results to technically counter the effects of dark patterns when users face them on their devices.