# Circumvention by design -- dark patterns in cookie consents for online news outlets

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.13985 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.13985/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 24 Jun 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Investigating the Impact of Dark Patterns on LLM-Based Web Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.18113/) (2025)
- [Characterizing and modeling harms from interactions with design patterns in AI interfaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.11370/) (2024)
- [Automated detection of dark patterns in cookie banners: how to do it poorly and why it is hard to do it any other way](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.11836/) (2022)
- [Dark patterns in e-commerce: a dataset and its baseline evaluations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.06543/) (2022)
- [Automatically Detecting Online Deceptive Patterns](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.07441/) (2024)
- [Mapping the Empirical Evidence of the GDPR (In-)Effectiveness: A Systematic Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16735/) (2023)
- [Why is the User Interface a Dark Pattern? : Explainable Auto-Detection and its Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.04119/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

To ensure that users of online services understand what data are collected and how they are used in algorithmic decision-making, the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) specifies informed consent as a minimal requirement. For online news outlets consent is commonly elicited through interface design elements in the form of a pop-up. We have manually analyzed 300 data collection consent notices from news outlets that are built to ensure compliance with GDPR. The analysis uncovered a variety of strategies or dark patterns that circumvent the intent of GDPR by design. We further study the presence and variety of these dark patterns in these "cookie consents" and use our observations to specify the concept of dark pattern in the context of consent elicitation.