Asia-Pacific IGF 2022: Takeaways on Tackling Deceptive Design Across the Asia-Pacific Region – World Wide Web Foundation

This blog post was written by Kaushalya Gupta, Policy Program Manager and Lead on the Tech Policy Design Lab on Tackling Deceptive Design and Moving Towards Trusted Design

The use of deceptive designs, also known as ‘dark patterns’, is harming consumer safety, privacy, and trust around the world. Default design practices like these are widespread in the Asia Pacific, preventing 60% of the world’s population from leveraging the internet to its full potential.
The Web Foundation’s panel and workshop at the Asia-Pacific Internet Governance Forum, held in Singapore in September 2022, brought together around 100 participants, offline and online, comprising researchers, policy experts, designers, entrepreneurs, and members of civil society. Together, we mapped out the gaps in designing for digital products and platforms and the particular challenges for the people in the region, identified major blocks in existing efforts, and discussed solution models that combine design, advocacy, and innovative policymaking to advance an alternative future with trusted design.
 Sage Cheng, Access Now (left) and Kaushalya Gupta, Web Foundation (centre) at the Asia-Pacific Internet Governance Forum session moderated by Anju Mangal (right)
The following five takeaways represent key challenges and opportunities in tackling deceptive designs in Asia-Pacific:
During the co-creation workshops, public gatherings at conferences and events, consultations, and key informant interviews undertaken as part of the Web Foundation’s research, it emerged that designers do not want to make deceptive design, and most platforms do not want to perpetuate these practices but are somewhat constrained by growth models in a data-driven digital economy. Therefore, solutions must be discussed openly with stakeholders representing different sectors and regions in order to be agreed upon and implemented.
By taking a design-led approach, the Web Foundation’s Tech Policy Design Lab is currently developing a portfolio of UX/UI prototypes to demonstrate a set of ‘trusted design’ principles. These principles were co-created by stakeholders across the globe through a series of workshops held in collaboration with 3×3 and Simply Secure. According to these design principles, digital products and platforms should respect human rights, ensure equitability and accessibility, stay informative and transparent to people who are using them, prioritise at-risk communities, and keep the product experience burden-free. 
Deceptive design has been a difficult problem to tackle, partially because the language we use to address deceptive design means different things to different stakeholders. Also, the interventions often come in silos, whether it is policy and regulations or ethical design initiatives in the Asia-Pacific region, a challenge trusted and responsible design advocates are grappling with globally. While there are several actors working in similar spaces and issues, they are often not seen to be working on the ‘deceptive design’ or ‘dark patterns’ issue per se. Participants were encouraged to continue collaborating on this issue at the Web Foundation’s Tech Policy Design Lab. We will submit the outcomes of the Lab to the UN Global Digital Compact to lay out shared principles for an open, free and secure digital future.
To learn more about the deceptive design issue in the Asia-Pacific region, we have put together a reading list below:
Australia
India
Korea
New Zealand
South-East Asia
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