"My Mother Told Me These Things are Always Fake" - Understanding Teenagers' Experiences with Manipulative Designs
Lorena Sánchez Chamorro, Carine Lallemand, Colin M. Gray
Abstract
Manipulative and deceptive design practices are ubiquitous, impacting technology users in various ways across several domains. Certain groups are likely more susceptible to these impacts but have not received sufficient attention yet. In this paper, we seek to characterize one such understudied group, describing teenagers’ experience of manipulative design. We conducted semi-structured interviews with six teenagers between 15 and 17 years old, to understand their daily interactions with manipulative designs in three contexts: social networks, video games, and e-commerce. Using reflexive thematic analysis, our findings describe how risk is a shared experience for teenagers, and interrogate how teenagers’ personal and social context shape their experience of risk. We relate our findings to existing knowledge about how the general population is impacted by manipulative design practices and consider opportunities to further understand and support the experiences of teenagers and other vulnerable groups.