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About the Book

In an age where digital innovation shines, the murky practices behind the screens often remain shrouded in mystery. Unethical Software Engineering: Dark Patterns exposes how to manipulate, exploit, and deceive users for profit and control. From aggressive advertisers to bot pretenders, this book collects the dark patterns behind unethical software engineering practices, explains their consequences, and projects their insidious impact on our lives.

The book is structured in 5 parts:

1. Covert Surveillance: discover how software engineers redefine the boundaries of privacy in pursuit of data to market and sell products improved by exploiting their users.
2. Monetization at all costs: learn how profit-driven design trumps user experience and vendor reputation.
3. Digital Fraud: engineer deception, bait and switch and impersonation to erode trust in digital ecosystems.
4. Ranking Manipulation: distort user choice by corrupting the integrity of once trusted recommendation platforms
5. Unethical Artificial Intelligence Practices: harvest human creativity, create the illusion of flawless machines while dodging accountability and deeply spread misinformation.

Each chapter draws not just the context, problem and solution of these dark patterns but also unveils the profound ethical dilemmas they raise. This book serves as a wake-up call to developers, architects, regulators, and users alike. It urges the tech industry to rethink its priorities, challenging engineers where to draw the line and craft software that respects and empowers users rather than exploiting and disrupting them.

Unethical Software Engineering: Dark Patterns is an essential read for anyone, whether you're an industry insider or an everyday user. Prepare to confront the darkness behind some of the code and demand an ethical future for digital technology.

About the Author

Cesare Pautasso

@pautasso

Cesare Pautasso is full professor at the Software Institute at USI, Lugano, Switzerland. Previously he was a researcher at the IBM Zurich Research Lab. His research group focuses on the Architecture, design and engineering of next-generation Web information systems. He is co-author of "SOA with REST" (2012), "Just Send an Email: Anti-Patterns for Email-Centric Organizations" (2015), the "BPMN Sketch Miner" (2019), "Software Architecture: visual lecture notes" (2020), "Business Process Modeling, Management and Mining: visual lecture notes" (2021), "Beautiful APIs" (2021), "Beautiful API Evolution" (2021), "Beautiful Big APIs" (2022), "RESTful Dictionary" (2022), "Web Atelier: visual lecture notes" (2023), "Patterns for API Design : Simplifying Integration with Loosely Coupled Message Exchanges" (2023), "Unethical Software Engineering: Dark Patterns" (2024).