Fairpatterns

France's consumer protection authority, the DGCCRF, imposed two new fines against SHEIN on June 3, following investigations carried out in 2025 into the fr.shein.com website. The first fine, €5.7 million, was for failing to comply with the right of withdrawal and for withholding mandatory environmental product information. This was not the first time SHEIN had been cited for the missing environmental information. The second fine, €16.7 million, was for sending order confirmations that were missing six categories of information required under French consumer law: the price of goods, delivery timeframes, the seller's identity and contact details, information on legal guarantees, the option to use a mediator, and the withdrawal form. These two fines follow a €40 million penalty imposed on SHEIN last summer by French authorities, on different grounds, for fake discounts. French regulators have now imposed over €210 million in total penalties against SHEIN: more than €62 million from the DGCCRF across separate investigations, and €150 million from the CNIL. Each investigation has found a different category of failure. Pricing practices, environmental disclosures, consumer rights, and distance selling obligations. This is precisely what Fairpatterns detects at scale, across e-commerce platforms and product categories, before a regulator comes looking. Swipe through for the full breakdown 👉

VivaTech turns 10 this year, and the Fairpatterns team will be there. Come meet us and our CEO & Co-Founder, Marie Potel-Saville. From June 17–20, find us at booth 2D11-002, La French Tech Grand Paris pavilion, Hall 7.2, Paris Expo Porte de Versailles. Predatory design has become a systemic legal risk: dark patterns, addictive design, algorithmic price discrimination... Billions in fines, thousands of class actions, and compliance teams with no tool to act upstream. FairPatterns is the first AI solution that automatically scans digital interfaces to detect these risks, map them to applicable regulations (DSA, GDPR, AI Act, FTC Act), and generate remediation directly actionable by product and compliance teams. Already used by international law firms and large corporations in Europe and the United States, FairPatterns delivers digital audits with integrated remediation and court-ready, authenticated evidence. Four days to talk about what predatory design is costing businesses and what to do about it. If you'll be in Paris, let's meet. See you at VivaTech. 👋 La French Tech Grand Paris #VivaTech #VivaTech2026 #PavillonFrenchTechGrandParis #Innovation #TechEvent #Startups

A new study tested how two specific dark patterns, confirmshaming (making people feel ashamed of refusing an offer pushed to them) and trick questions (confusing language to obscure choice), affect decision-making on a streaming subscription platform. Users who recognised confirmshaming as a manipulative tactic still chose the more expensive plan 68% of the time. For this type of dark pattern, knowing you are being manipulated did not reliably change the outcome. This is consistent with previous research (Bongard-Blanchi, Rossi et al, 2021). Trick questions behaved differently. When users understood what was happening, only 35% chose the most expensive offer that was pushed through the dark pattern. And 40% of those users went back and changed their initial choice after recognising the pattern. In the confirmshaming test, only 10% did the same. The study also looked at who is most affected by dark patterns. Users with fewer services and lower streaming frequency were most likely to fall for trick questions. Heavy users with multiple subscriptions were most likely to fall for confirmshaming. Digital experience does not offer uniform protection. Different patterns catch different people. This is precisely why all these predatory designs have to be removed at the source, one way or another. Precisely what FairPatterns does: our multimodal AI finds and fixes dark patterns and addictive design, maps each pattern to corresponding legal violations in US and EU, and provides a ready-to-use interface. Spoiler alert, we’re also baking a free B2C solution. Stay tuned! Swipe through for the full breakdown 👉

Fairpatterns has been selected as a Tech for Change company at VivaTech 2026. This recognition spotlights startups combining measurable positive impact, strong technology, and business viability. For us, it reflects the work we've been doing to detect predatory design at scale and turn digital violations into court-ready evidence. Tech for Change is a programme run in partnership with Axionable, Envision Group, UNESCO, WWF, and Les Echos/Le Parisien. We'll be at VivaTech this year as part of the La French Tech Grand Paris village. Find us at booth 2D11-002, Hall 7.2, Paris Expo Porte de Versailles. #TechForChange #VivaTech #PavillonFrenchTechGrandParis

Meta settled last week with a Kentucky school district that had sued it over addictive design practices harming students' mental health. Snap, TikTok, and YouTube had settled with the same district days earlier. A jury trial had been expected to launch in June. The settlement amounts are not public. The Breathitt County School District had asked for more than $60 million. The complaint accused the platforms of operating their businesses to "exploit the neurophysiology of the brain's reward systems," and alleged they deliberately targeted young people because their profits increase as time on the platform rises. The district said it has spent significant sums tracking and treating what it described as the results of social media addiction, including suicides, cyberbullying, and other cyber abuses. "Despite plaintiff's best efforts, the mental health crisis persists, and the budget is not adequate to take the steps needed to fully address this crisis," the complaint read. This was a bellwether case, the first of at least 1,200 lawsuits brought by school districts against the same platforms for similar alleged harms. The other cases have not yet been tried. The complaint described the core problem clearly: young people lack the emotional maturity and impulse control to perceive and resist the manipulation happening through these platforms. Swipe through for the full breakdown 👉 Link to case: https://lnkd.in/gvg7EKbM

This is Part 3 of our breakdown of the Texas lawsuit against Netflix. Part 1 covered the gap between Netflix's public promises and what it allegedly built. Part 2 covered the technical infrastructure inside the platform. This part covers what Texas is asking the court to impose. The complaint brings five counts of deceptive conduct under the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act. According to the suit, these cover misrepresentation of the privacy and ad-free model, deception regarding kids’ profiles, undisclosed third-party data sharing, deceptive use of addictive design features, and failure to disclose the scale of Netflix's data collection. On remedies, Texas is asking for several things beyond financial penalties. According to the complaint, the State is requesting a court order requiring Netflix to purge all data allegedly collected deceptively from Texas residents, and an injunction prohibiting Netflix from collecting, sharing, or selling user data without express informed consent and clear notice of its practices. For children specifically, the complaint requests that Netflix be required to obtain parental consent before collecting behavioural data on kids’ profiles, and that autoplay be set to off by default for all children's accounts. The financial exposure is significant. The complaint seeks civil penalties of up to $10,000 per violation, with an additional amount of up to $250,000 per violation where the practice targeted consumers aged 65 or older. Texas is also asking the court to order Netflix to disgorge assets gained through the allegedly deceptive practices. The case was brought under the existing consumer protection law. No new legislation was required to bring a challenge of this scale against platform design. Full case: https://lnkd.in/eR-RD8_8 Petition.pdf

This is Part 2 of our breakdown of the Texas lawsuit against Netflix. Part 1 covered the gap between what Netflix promised publicly and what it allegedly built. This part covers what the complaint describes as the technical infrastructure behind the platform. According to the complaint, Netflix captures 160,000 unique data points every 30 seconds a user watches content and logs 550 billion events per day across its platform. The complaint cites Netflix's own engineering blog posts and internal presentations to make this point. According to those sources, Netflix engineers described the company internally as "really a logging company that occasionally streams movies." The lawsuit also takes aim at autoplay specifically. According to the complaint, Netflix engineered autoplay not as a convenience feature but to eliminate what the suit calls stopping cues, the natural moments when a user might choose to stop watching. This addictive design feature was built to drive Netflix's data collection enterprise. On children: according to the complaint, the same granular behavioural data collected on adult users was collected on children using kids’ profiles. The suit alleges parents received no meaningful disclosure of this. The complaint also cites Netflix's own social media posts, which, according to the suit, used insights drawn from users' private viewing habits to taunt them publicly. Part 3 covers the remedies Texas is asking the court to impose. Full case: https://lnkd.in/eR-RD8_8 Petition.pdf

Texas just sued Netflix. The complaint, filed on May 11, 2026, describes what it calls a years-long bait and switch. According to the lawsuit, Netflix built its brand on a simple proposition: it was the privacy-respecting alternative to Big Tech. No ads. No data mining. A safe place for families. According to the complaint, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings promised publicly that Netflix would "never" sell advertising and was a "complete, isolated data island." The suit alleges that while Netflix was making those promises, it was building the same advertising and surveillance infrastructure it had publicly criticised. According to the complaint, Netflix opened its users' data to commercial data brokers including Experian and Acxiom, entities entirely unrelated to streaming entertainment. The suit also alleges Netflix partnered with ad-tech platforms including Google Display and Video 360 and The Trade Desk to merge Netflix user data with information collected off the platform, without disclosing this to users. According to the complaint, Netflix marketed kids profiles as safe, segregated environments for children. The suit alleges the data collection behind those profiles was identical to what applied to every other user. The complaint describes this as deception by omission. The case is brought under the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act. This is the first of three carousels breaking down the case. Full case: https://lnkd.in/ewHA82BR

We will be at VivaTech 2026. For the 10th anniversary edition of worldwide’s leading tech gathering, we’ll be joining the La French Tech Grand Paris pavilion alongside a collective of companies shaping the next generation of European innovation. From June 17–20, you’ll find us at the La French Tech Grand Paris pavilion, Hall 7.2, Paris Expo Porte de Versailles. Over four days, we look forward to reconnecting with founders, operators, investors and enterprise leaders across the European tech ecosystem. If you’ll be in Paris, let’s connect. See you at VivaTech. #VivaTech #VivaTech2026 #PavillonFrenchTechGrandParis #Innovation #TechEvent #Startups

A $5 million class-action lawsuit filed in May 2026 accuses Delta Air Lines of using its website design, i.e. dark patterns, to steer passengers away from cash refunds they were entitled to. Passengers who paid a higher price specifically for a fully refundable ticket are taken to a cancellation page where the e-credit option is pre-selected, and the cash refund option sits below the fold, out of immediate view. The lawsuit argues that most passengers never scroll far enough to find it. The complaint makes the financial logic explicit. Delta internally values cash at twice the value of an e-credit, according to the suit. E-credits expire after one year and lock the customer into flying with Delta again. When a credit goes unused, Delta keeps the money for a service it never provided. The complaint raises three claims: breach of contract for failing to deliver the cash refund the ticket promised, deceptive business practices under New York law and FTC guidelines, and unjust enrichment from credits that expire unclaimed. The case follows recent Department of Transportation rule changes intended to make airline refunds more automatic. This lawsuit focuses on something narrower: passengers who specifically paid extra for a fully refundable ticket and were steered away from it by the design of the cancellation page. Swipe through for the full breakdown 👉 Fairpatterns finds and fixes dark patterns and addictive design automatically, so compliance gaps can be identified and fixed before class actions hit.