| name | reviewing-ethical-design |
| description | Reviews a change for diff-visible, code-level ethical / responsible-design defects — the non-ML analog of harmful-output review, a sibling of security (harm to the user/subject, not via an attacker): dark patterns and deceptive flows (sneaking, fabricated urgency/scarcity, misdirection/confirmshaming, obstruction, forced action, nagging), manipulative defaults and asymmetric choices (pre-checked consent, opt-out harder than opt-in, auto-renew), discriminatory business logic in plain conditionals (a hardcoded threshold or proxy disadvantaging a group, no model in sight), dishonest state/signals, and consent theater. Strictly detect-and-route: name the pattern with evidence, then route the decision — consent-as-law to #27/legal, product trade-offs to product, a11y mechanics to #23. Use when reviewing consent/opt-out flows, defaults, pricing/eligibility conditionals, or onboarding/checkout/cancellation funnels. Skip internal code with no user-facing behavior; deep model-fairness auditing is out of scope. |
| provenance | {"taxonomy_version":"v0.9","built_from":[{"category":36,"source":"docs/research/cluster-4-runtime.md#36","hash":"c454ac4bb51dff97993fa5759ac150755d28d20daecfda0b4675599482c03815"}]} |
reviewing-ethical-design
Does this manipulate or disadvantage the user? Dark patterns, manipulative defaults, discriminatory conditionals — detect-and-route to product/legal.
When to use
Reviews a change for diff-visible, code-level ethical / responsible-design defects — the non-ML analog of harmful-output review, a sibling of security (harm to the user/subject, not via an attacker): dark patterns and deceptive flows (sneaking, fabricated urgency/scarcity, misdirection/confirmshaming, obstruction, forced action, nagging), manipulative defaults and asymmetric choices (pre-checked consent, opt-out harder than opt-in, auto-renew), discriminatory business logic in plain conditionals (a hardcoded threshold or proxy disadvantaging a group, no model in sight), dishonest state/signals, and consent theater. Strictly detect-and-route: name the pattern with evidence, then route the decision — consent-as-law to #27/legal, product trade-offs to product, a11y mechanics to #23. Use when reviewing consent/opt-out flows, defaults, pricing/eligibility conditionals, or onboarding/checkout/cancellation funnels. Skip internal code with no user-facing behavior; deep model-fairness auditing is out of scope.
Shape: diff. Written for concrete code; not meant for design docs or plans.
Reviewer discipline
Report only real problems. If the code correctly handles the case, reply "No findings" and stop — do not invent issues. This guards against false positives on correct code; still report every genuine issue you do find, with its full detail.
Defects are the default; improvements are opt-in. By default this lens is defect-only: do not suggest changes to code that is already correct. When the team has opted up into improvement suggestions, a finding on already-correct code is admissible only as nit-severity, route: implementer (the author applies, defers, or ignores), and must clear the non-configurable anti-churn floor: it must genuinely improve — never offer a merely equivalent alternative — and must converge (once a dimension is as good as you can confidently make it, stop; never oscillate A→B then B→A, never re-order to an equivalent state). Defects keep the strict bar above regardless of this setting.
Team preferences. If the reviewed repo has .code-quality-atlas/preferences.md, apply it before reporting: a repo's .code-quality-atlas/preferences.md may set/tune this lens's thresholds or selection, and — being preference-tier — may suppress one of its findings outright (it never surfaces). Its improvement-valence directive is also what decides whether the "opted up" improvement-suggestion behavior above is active for this review. Absent the file, apply this lens's defaults exactly as written above.
Pre-existing defects in touched code are surfaceable, not yours to fix. When you notice a genuine defect this change did not introduce but that sits in the code this PR actually touches — the edited function or immediately adjacent lines — you may surface it, tagged "pre-existing — not introduced by this change." Like improvements it is opt-in and default-quiet (off unless the team opts up), route: implementer, and non-blocking: it informs the author's fix-now / file-a-ticket / ignore call and never sets this PR's verdict, because the diff did not cause it. Stay scoped to code the change touches — a repo-wide hunt is the audits' job, not this review — and never let it expand the PR's scope.
Top checks
The head of the full checklist — enough for a first pass without opening any reference file:
- Dark pattern / deceptive flow (detect-and-route): Does the change introduce a recognized dark pattern — sneaking (hidden costs, sneak-into-basket), fabricated urgency/scarcity (a countdown or "only 2 left" not backed by truth), misdirection / confirmshaming, obstruction (roach-motel cancel), forced action, or nagging (Mathur's 7 / the EDPB's 6 families)? Name the specific category and cite the code that implements it; route the keep-or-kill product judgment to
product and any consent-law facet to #27 / legal. Surface with evidence — never decide the product trade-off here, never drop it either.
- Manipulative defaults & asymmetric choices: Are defaults set to benefit the business against the user's likely intent — pre-checked consent / marketing opt-in, opt-out materially harder than opt-in, "accept all" prominent while "reject" is buried or absent, negative-option / auto-renew with no clear disclosure? The default value and the asymmetry of the choice are the defect, visible right in the code that sets them.
- Discriminatory business logic in plain conditionals: Does a hardcoded threshold, branch, or rule disadvantage a protected or vulnerable group with no model in sight — pricing / eligibility / scoring keyed (directly, or by proxy: ZIP, surname, device, locale) on a protected attribute, or a cutoff with a foreseeable disparate effect? Flag the conditional with evidence; route the legal/fairness adjudication to #27 /
legal and the policy call to product / leadership. (Deep dataset/metric fairness auditing is out of scope — no diff artifact.)
- Honest state & truthful signals: Do the user-facing claims the code emits match reality — a "secure" / "private" / "deleted" label for data that isn't, a fabricated progress bar / "N people are viewing this" / fake low-stock, or a synthetic error/system message engineered to drive a choice? A signal the code knows to be false is a defect regardless of product intent.
- Consent & opt-out actually wired (not theater): When the change gates behavior on consent, does declining actually stop the behavior rather than just hide a toggle, and is withdrawal as easy as granting (GDPR Art. 7(3))? Consent theater — a dialog whose "no" path still proceeds — is the defect; the consent-as-law verdict routes to #27.
- Asymmetric friction (obstruction vs. protection): Is the user-favorable path (cancel, unsubscribe, delete account, export data) made disproportionately harder than the business-favorable one (sign up, buy, opt in)? Distinguish obstruction (friction that serves the business against the user's clear intent) from legitimate protective friction (a confirmation on a destructive action, step-up auth, a cooling-off period) — route the protective-control side to #14 /
sweeping-for-security; obstruction stays a finding here.
- Coercion / pressure in control flow: Does the flow block or repeatedly push toward the "preferred" choice — interstitials with no genuine dismiss, re-prompts after a clear "no," a continue button disabled until an upsell is taken, confirmshaming microcopy? Pressure engineered into ordinary control flow is reviewable code, not just visual design.
- Vulnerable-user & high-stakes context: For flows touching minors, health, finance, or addiction-adjacent mechanics (loot boxes, variable-reward infinite scroll, streak pressure), is there heightened care rather than the same growth-optimized defaults? Surface for
product / legal with evidence; the bar is higher and the defaults that pass elsewhere may not pass here.
- Accessibility-as-exclusion (xref #23): Is an ethical harm delivered through an accessibility gap — the consent or cancel control operable only by sighted/mouse users, or contrast/affordance used to hide the user-favorable option while surfacing the business-favorable one? Route the a11y mechanics to #23; the deceptive intent is owned here.
Mechanizing these checks
Where a finding here is one a tool can catch deterministically, surface that as an advisory route: implementer note next to the finding: the hand review caught it this time, and wiring the matching tool from reference/tool-rules.md into CI gates it going forward. This is a suggestion to mechanize, not a defect — it never blocks a verdict, and it falls away on a repo that already runs the tool.
Process notes. If this lens misfired on this change — flagged correct code, missed an obvious issue squarely in its own scope, or its checklist didn't fit the change shape — say so in one line under synthesizing-review-findings's Process notes appendix; that is not a defect finding. Say nothing if the lens worked as intended — never invent a process note to fill the section.
Going deeper
- reference/heuristics.md — the full checklist; open it when the change sits squarely in this lens's domain.
- examples.md — concrete good/bad findings, and the output format to match.
- reference/tool-rules.md — static-analysis rules covering the mechanical subset; for wiring up linters, not needed for the judgment review itself.
- reference/sources.md — the research behind each check; for provenance, not needed during a review.
