Dark Pattern Detector

Browse the web confidently by knowing when a site tries to manipulate you. By: Nathan Tao, Ada Langford, Sophia Lin, Rachel Rakower.

Dark patterns are subtle, deceptive tricks used by websites and apps to influence your decisions, often leading you to act in ways that benefit the company rather than yourself, such as pressuring you to buy their products by making countdown timers or warning that the stock is limited. Our extension is designed to help you spot and avoid these manipulative tactics by detecting common types of dark patterns like misdirection, social proof, forced action, urgency, and scarcity. With our extension, all the text on any website you visit is automatically scanned using a TinyBERT model, which is specifically fine-tuned to detect these dark patterns. When something suspicious is found, the extension highlights the problematic text, making it easy for you to see where a site might be trying to manipulate you. Our main goal is to help you browse the web more safely and confidently by identifying these hidden tactics. We believe that by making these dark patterns visible, we can empower users like you to make smarter, more informed decisions while shopping or navigating online. To learn more about dark patterns and how our extension works, check out our website here: https://dark-pattern-detector.xyz/.