Policy and legal implications. Any AI computational system aiming to detect dark patterns should align to detectable issues that are already deemed illegal by authoritative sources. But there are only few (mandatory) legal rules in Europe constraining the use of dark patterns, and enforcement is slow in holding websites accountable. The only mandatory decision ascertaining any UI based aspect is dated of 2019 forbidding the use of pre-ticked boxes (of Justice of the European Union, 2019). From Article 7(3) of the GDPR ("it shall be as easy to withdraw as to give consent", it can be interpreted that privacy choices should be equal (e.g. parity in accept, reject and revoke choices) Nouwens et al., 2020b). Parity feature entails i) equal widgets, ii) equal number of times to either accept/reject/revoke consent, iii) across modalities (web, mobile and app setting levels) (Johanna Gunawan, 2021). This reasoning on feature parity needs still to be held definitive by court decisions as well for consistency in all EU. The ePrivacy Regulation draft 14 , being discussed in the European Council, as of today, is absent on the definition of dark patterns or UI features, even accepting the use of cookie walls (Council's version), considered as an onstructive dark pattern (Kretschmer et al., 2021;Gray et al., 2021). Such weak enforcement and the high rate of consent optimization enhanced by using faulty designs in cookie banners (Hils et al., 2020; at scale, facilitated by the use of consent management platforms, explain the recurrent use of dark patterns in cookie banners. In the future, we need to see a more serious approach to enforcement, either by courts, or by decisions issued by **data** protection authorities. That is the only way to ensure that automated systems can rely on the necessary legal certainty in identifying dark patterns by identifying concrete characteristics of design.