Ashley Sheil presented her paper on dark patterns in subscriptions at the CHI24 conference on human factors in computing systems in Hawaii. CHI is one of the top ranked conferences in computer science. The study was a collaboration between Maynooth University with Dr David Malone and Radboud university, Nijmegen in the Netherlands with Dr Gunes Acar, Dr Hanna Schraffenberger and Dr Raphael Gellert.

 

Their study characterizes the subscription and cancellation flows of popular news websites from four different countries, and discusses them in the context of recent regulatory changes.

The project focused on the design features that make it difficult to cancel a subscription and found several cancellation flows that featured intentional barriers, such as forcing users to call a representative or type in a phrase. Many subscription flows do not adequately inform users about recurring charges. The results point to a growing need for effective regulation of designs that trick, coerce, or manipulate users into paying for subscriptions they do not want.

 

The paper received much attention at the conference and was posted on a Reddit science thread, receiving 2.8 thousand up votes and 103 comments. The response to the paper highlights the fact that cancelling subscriptions is a grievance for many people.

 

Ashley Sheil is currently working in MTU as a post-doc on the SFI National Challenge Fund: Our Tech project focusing on cybersafety for vulnerable populations led by Dr Hazel Murray. Her background is mathematics and physics and her PhD centred around cybersecurity and privacy, where she also looked at dark patterns in Irish cookie banners and guessing partial PINs.