  Dark patterns have become increasingly pervasive in online choice
architectures, encompassing practices like subscription traps, hiding
information about fees, pre-selecting options by default, nagging, and drip
pricing. Regulators around the world have started to express concerns that such
practices are causing substantial consumer detriment. This Article focuses on
the legal response to dark patterns in the European Union. It provides the
first comprehensive mapping of European Union laws expressly addressing dark
patterns. The Article argues that these laws protect biased consumers and adopt
autonomy as a normative lens to assess dark patterns. Consequently, regulating
dark patterns in European Union law means regulating for autonomy. This
normative lens is under-researched.
  This Article addresses this gap in research with two principle contributions.
First, it works out a specific conception of autonomous decision-making, rooted
in the paradigm that providing consumers with information enables consumers to
make an informed decision. Second, the Article offers a novel normative
classification for dark patterns in online choice architectures. It develops a
taxonomy encompassing six categories of autonomy violations, specifically
tailored for the assessment and regulation of dark patterns that exploit
consumer behavioral biases. These categories serve multiple purposes. They
uncover and make explicit the autonomy violations addressed by existing
European Union laws. They delineate the contentious line between acceptable
influences on consumer decision-making and autonomy violations that may warrant
regulation in online choice architectures. They also provide policymakers in
the EU and elsewhere with a framework when deliberating the regulation of other
instances of dark patterns.
