Email the Author
You can use this page to email Cesare Pautasso about Unethical Software Engineering.
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 their impact on our lives.
The book is structured in 5 parts:
- Covert Surveillance: break through the boundaries of privacy to extract data for marketing products improved by exploiting their users.
- Monetization at all costs: profit-driven design trumps user experience and vendor reputation.
- Digital Fraud: deception, bait and switch and impersonation erode trust in digital ecosystems.
- Ranking Manipulation: distort user choice by corrupting the integrity of once trusted recommendation platforms
- 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 engineers, developers, architects, regulators, and users alike. It urges the tech industry to rethink its priorities. It helps every engineer — just doing their job — as it challenges them 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.
Listen to a podcast interview of the author here.
About the Author
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).