37:31 minutes
|
December 18, 2025
#34 Dark Patterns
How Design Nudges Become Exploits with Marie Potel
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About The Speaker
Marie Potel-Saville is an impact entrepreneur, the Co-Founder & CEO of Fair Patterns, the AI solution that finds and fixes dark patterns at scale. She is also the Paris Chair of Women in AI Governance, and an expert in dark patterns with the European Data Protection Board. She’s a former lawyer and GC, and teaches at Singapore Management University, Sciences Po and Paris II university. She’s also an advisory board member at the BASIL research initiative, the Serpentine Galleries and Pickering Pierce.
Episode Description
This episode of Business and Society unpacks “dark patterns” – deceptive design features in apps and websites that push people into actions they never intended, such as unwanted subscriptions, extra fees, oversharing data, or staying online longer than planned. Guest Marie Potel, founder of Fair Patterns, explains that these patterns are fundamentally different from normal marketing because they exploit cognitive biases and obscure critical information, undermining user autonomy, distorting competition, and even posing risks to democracy when people are trained to click “I agree” without thinking.
Marie and Senthil discuss concrete cases like fake urgency in travel and hotel booking, and Amazon’s multi‑billion‑dollar settlement over Prime sign‑ups and cancellations, before turning to solutions. Marie outlines how Fair Patterns uses ethical AI and a Figma plugin to detect and replace dark patterns with transparent “fair patterns,” and argues that fair, plain‑language design not only reduces legal risk but also builds trust and can drive higher long‑term growth for companies that adopt it.
