From Dark Patterns Research to Landmark Litigation: UChicago CS PhD Graduate Brennan Schaffner Receives ACM SIGCHI Special Recognition Award

Recent University of Chicago Computer Science PhD graduate Brennan Schaffner was awarded the prestigious ACM SIGCHI Special Recognition at CHI 2026! This award is granted to those who demonstrate achievements that do not fall readily into existing award categories, and Schaffner was cited for his research on dark patterns and key contributions to a major dark patterns court case. His recent paper, “A Systematic Review of User Experiments on the Effects of Dark Patterns”, discussed recent experimental studies and quantifies how dark patterns, and subsequent interventions, influence users. This paper represented a culmination of his work at UChicago, in which Schaffner worked in the AIR Lab led by Associate Professor Marshini Chetty. He studied the attentional and cognitive consequences of dark patterns on users, work that formed the crux of his dissertation. However, Schaffner’s impact extends beyond academic publishing — on September 25, 2025, Amazon agreed to a $2.5 billion settlement with the FTC over deceptive Amazon Prime enrollment and cancellation practices, a result that was in part due to Schaffner’s research and involvement in the court case.

Schaffner is now a postdoctoral researcher at Georgetown University, and his work involves mapping the use of empirical evidence in digital platform litigation to promote user well-being. We sat down with Schaffner to discuss his research on dark patterns and involvement with the Amazon court case. We are excited to follow all the great work that he will do!

Tell me about your background and how you got to where you are today.

I am on a somewhat meandering path that looks more direct in hindsight, a not uncommon feeling in the academic world. I was lucky to begin research as an undergraduate at the University of St Thomas in St Paul, Minnesota. I started as a more systems-oriented computer scientist interested in quantum, physics, and cloud computing. I then went straight to graduate school, although, during my PhD at UChicago, I made the switch to Human-Computer Interaction because at the time I felt I wanted work closer to the user. While advised by Marshini Chetty, I studied the importance of human factors in computing and how computer science research necessarily reaches outside of the devices and underlying technologies involved.

You recently presented work at CHI 2026 on the effects of dark patterns. How do you define dark patterns, and why are they important right now?

Informally, dark patterns are design elements that push, force, or trick users into outcomes that they otherwise would not prefer. The often-used canonical example of a dark pattern is the cookie banner that has a prominent, ambiguously-worded, privacy-unfriendly option alongside a maze of configurations and choices to secure the most privacy-friendly alternate options. Although, the manifestations of dark patterns and our understanding of them have evolved over the past several years, and the research has evolved accordingly. Contemporary dark pattern research focuses on temporal interactions, sociotechnical contexts, legal connections, novel interaction mechanisms, etc. These important issues form one piece of the larger puzzle facing our society, where the technology ecosystem is falling short on some of its promises.

How do dark patterns affect everyday users, especially in sectors like social media and ecommerce?

The work I presented at CHI 2026 aggregates all of the controlled experiments that researchers have conducted with dark patterns. The results illustrate that dark patterns indeed are effective at changing user outcomes, resulting in individuals losing more time, money, and privacy as a result of platform design. There is a lot of complementary work highlighting the qualitative effects of dark patterns that are harder to measure, like users’ reduced feelings of agency or attention capture. Examples on social media include, buried and unreliable platform settings defaulted to having users share more data than they otherwise would or complex notification and feed algorithms optimized to increase time spent that users would otherwise prefer spending on higher value engagements. With online shopping, dark patterns draw from a longer history of deceptive marketplace practices, including misleading advertisements, fake scarcity or time pressure, or automatic enrollments in difficult-to-cancel subscriptions.

What were you working on when you were at UChicago? How did your time at UChicago inform your research and interests?

The mission of the research lab led by Dr. Chetty—the AIRLab—is to make the internet more trustworthy. This was of course is the main throughline of all the work we did. This involved some work on understanding content moderation policies to identify components that stood out as helpful or others that were missing and exploring research methods that preserved participant privacy. Mostly though, I studied dark patterns. And my dark patterns work ultimately formed my dissertation. I approached dark patterns from a slightly different angle than others. While most work focused on the financial and privacy harms found on social media and ecommerce, I was interested in the potential of dark patterns having attentional and cognitive harms.

By the nature of the work I did at UChicago, I was lucky to have opportunities to work with legal scholars. Often my research came to a conclusion where it would need to be picked up, considered, and potentially acted upon, by legal scholars. These interactions certainly shaped my trajectory towards an interest into how HCI research can work alongside law, regulation, and litigation.

How did you get involved in the Amazon court case? What was the outcome, and what were your thoughts, reflections, or insights from the experience?

My advisor, Dr. Chetty, was working as an expert on the Amazon case. The FTC asked her about conducting a research study to include in her expert report for the case. Marshini asked me to help shape and conduct that research. I eagerly accepted and joined the team.

It ultimately became one of the standout experiences from my time in graduate school. I was used to the standard publication peer-review process in academia, but this work was to be used in court, an entirely different audience with different expectations. Being forced to think in that different role has definitely shaped how I consider research moving forward. We conducted the research without knowing what the outcomes would be, and filed it into the docket, which became public when the case went to trial. For the study, we designed and tested an online shopping website that was a near clone to Amazon, uncovering problems through user testing. For example, there was clear evidence of participants enrolling in the website’s subscription (modeled after Amazon Prime) on accident as well as later thinking they cancelled the subscription when they actually hadn’t.

The case resulted in one of the largest settlements attained by the FTC to date. The fact our research helped shape the case and now exists in the public federal court record is something I am proud of. It is also a great example of the work HCI researchers are doing in the courts around the country.

Why is this work important to you?

There are clear paradigm-shifting benefits from the Internet age, but that doesn’t mean we should be forced to settle with the shortcomings. A common argument is that dark patterns and other problematic designs are status quo business practices. However, even if a harmful practice can be tied to business incentives, lack of resources dedicated to user testing, or even innocent implementation mistakes, that does not mean the practice has to continue. Our work supported that online shoppers were being enrolled in monthly subscriptions without their knowledge and faced difficulties when asked to cancel their subscriptions. In cases like these, where platforms stray from society’s best interests, court cases can help course correct, as they have done so historically. And imbuing those court processes with domain experts and research strengthens the scaffolding realigning business incentives with societal values.

What does the SIGCHI Special Recognition mean to you?

I am honored and grateful to receive the award. I am excited that this kind of work received special recognition because collaborating with litigators is one way that academic researchers are having significant impact around the country, yet it is not highly known. In many cases, it remains legally confidential. There are so many researchers doing great work that really deserve this recognition (especially Dr. Chetty!). I am happy this work has made a splash, and I am delighted to see the intersection of HCI and Law continue to burn hot.

What are you working on now at Georgetown? What are your longer term goals?

I am picking up where my prior work left off and taking a somewhat zoomed-out perspective. I am lucky to be working on a team (including lawyers) that aims to connect independent research with policy. The main project I am working on aims to analyze how research is being used in tech court cases—quite relevant!

Long term though, I cannot yet say. For now I want to continue to grow in the intersection of HCI and Law. There is plenty of work to be done.