What is behind the extraordinary growth and usage of the app — Whether you like it or not, TikTok’s numbers are impressive. It has over 1 billion monthly active users. It was downloaded 3 billion times worldwide and it is so far the most downloaded app this year. The average user opens TikTok 8 times per day. …

In today’s newsletter, I analyze some of Facebook’s dark patterns that affect our privacy. Dark Patterns in privacy are manipulative design practices that exploit our cognitive biases to make us share more data than we would do if we had more information about what is going on Watch the 6…

This week I would like to start a discussion about privacy settings: are they purposefully complicated in order to trigger cognitive biases and be an obstacle to privacy-preserving decisions? Or privacy is such a complicated topic that it would be impossible to design an easy-to-navigate menu? Or both? …

In today’s newsletter, I would like to talk about what is privacy and why protecting it is essential to foster values such as freedom, autonomy and human dignity in the digital age. First, there are plenty of academic definitions of what is privacy. One of the first definitions and that…

Continuing last week’s conversation about User Vulnerabilities in the Data Cycle and How to Mitigate Them, today I would like to talk more about Privacy-Enhancing Design , specifically by analyzing a very good and a very bad example of cookie banners on the web (and why one is a Privacy-Enhancing…

and how UX designers can help to mitigate them — Continuing last week’s conversation about Privacy-Enhancing Design as a way to improve user privacy and reduce user vulnerabilities, this week I would like to take a step back and discuss the different types of user vulnerabilities that exist throughout the data cycle and have a negative effect on user privacy…

And how it can be a game changer for data protection. — Continuing last post's discussion about Data Protection Design as a new discipline, this week I would like to raise the topic of Privacy-Enhancing Design and its technical role as a framework of heuristics and practical UX design guidelines aiming at translating data protection law principles and rules to UX practices. A) WHAT IS PRIVACY-ENHANCING DESIGN? WHAT IS IT FOR?

and how data protection law & UX design must work together — In today’s post, I will propose and explain a new discipline: Data Protection Design, in which the worlds of Data Protection Law and UX Design are bridged and Privacy-Enhancing Design is the gold UX Design standard. As I explain below, this is a much-needed next step for data protection legislation…

A dive into the infamous world of deceptive design. — Deceptive patterns, according to Harry Brignull — the first designer who coined the term — are “tricks used in websites and apps that make you do things that you didn’t mean to, like buying or signing up for something.” Some common examples are websites that make it almost impossible to…