Johanna T. Gunawan

Bouillonstraat 1-3

6221LH Maastricht, Netherlands

Hi – I’m an Assistant Professor of CS and Law at the Maastricht University Law and Tech Lab.

My research spans UX, privacy, consumer protections, and law. At present, I’m focusing on dark patterns and manipulative interfaces across multiple contexts – I also study surveillance technologies and privacy erosion.

Before joining Maastricht University, I earned my PhD in Cybersecurity at Northeastern University, advised by David Choffnes, Woodrow Hartzog, and Christo Wilson. In industry, I’ve interned at Common Sense Media’s Privacy Program, Vimeo’s Governance, Risk, Compliance, and Privacy team, and previously wrote docs for Rapid7 and Akamai Technologies (Network Standards). Academically, I’ve been a visiting PhD intern with Yixin Zou at the Max Planck Institute of Security and Privacy, and earned my M.S. in Cybersecurity as an ALIGN Scholar as well as a B.A. in Political Science & International Affairs at Northeastern University.

More info in my CV.

(If you’re wondering how to pronounce my name, I’ve gone by both American and European pronunciations of Johanna my whole life–both work!)

news

Dec 01, 2025	Thrilled to announce that our (Lyra Hoeben-Kuil, Gijs van Dijck, Jaromir Savelka, myself, Konrad Kollnig, Marta Kolacz, Shashank Chakravarthy, and Hannes Westermann) work titled Can LLMs Create Legally Relevant Summaries and Analyses of Videos? was accepted to the JURIX’25 International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems! We’ll be presenting on this fantastic work in Torino just next week.
Nov 18, 2025	Our (myself, Colin Gray, Cristiana Santos, and Nataliia Bielova) work titled Leveraging Interdisciplinary Methods for Evidence Collection in Enforcement: Dark Patterns as a Case Study is now available in the Internet Policy Review Special Issue on “The Craft of Interdisciplinary Research and Methods in Public Interest Cybersecurity, Privacy, and Digital Rights Governance.”
Oct 25, 2025	We’ve kicked off our new Master’s Specialisation in Law and AI with LAW4102: Introduction to Modern Computing and AI. I’m thrilled to be teaching this course to law masters’ students and sharing all the fun stuff computer science has to offer over the next 7 weeks. We’re learning to build computational thinking skills, some programming experience, and familiarity with technical concepts.
Sep 25, 2025	Many thanks to the Dutch Digital Supervisors’ Cooperation Platform (SDT) for having me as a breakout session panelist for this year’s Symposium. Our panel was “Making online choices as a consumer: are you being tempted or misled?”
Sep 12, 2025	Our work (led by Ghada Alsebayel) on understanding dark patterns in FemTech mHealth apps, is now available at on the ACMDL in advance of MobileHCI’25 later this month.

selected publications

IPR

Leveraging Interdisciplinary Methods for Evidence Collection in Enforcement: Dark Patterns as a Case Study

Johanna T. Gunawan, Colin M. Gray, Cristiana Santos, and 1 more author

In Internet Policy Review Special Issue: The Craft of Interdisciplinary Research and Methods in Public Interest Cybersecurity, Privacy, and Digital Rights Governance, Nov 2025

Bib HTML

@inproceedings{gunawan-2025-ipr,
  author = {Gunawan, Johanna T. and Gray, Colin M. and Santos, Cristiana and Bielova, Nataliia},
  title = {Leveraging Interdisciplinary Methods for Evidence Collection in Enforcement: Dark Patterns as a Case Study},
  year = {2025},
  month = nov,
  publisher = {Internet Policy Review},
  booktitle = {Internet Policy Review Special Issue: The Craft of Interdisciplinary Research and Methods in Public Interest Cybersecurity, Privacy, and Digital Rights Governance},
  series = {IPR'25 Special Issue},
  url = {https://policyreview.info/articles/analysis/interdisciplinary-methods-dark-patterns},
}

DIS

Towards Key Contributing Factors in Identifying Dark Pattern Autonomy Violations under the EU Digital Services Act

Sanju Ahuja, Johanna Gunawan, Nataliia Bielova, and 1 more author

In Proceedings of the 2025 Designing Interactive Systems Conference, , Funchal, Madeira, Portugal, , Jul 2025

Bib HTML

@inproceedings{ahuja-2025-dis,
  author = {Ahuja, Sanju and Gunawan, Johanna and Bielova, Nataliia and Santos, Cristiana},
  title = {Towards Key Contributing Factors in Identifying Dark Pattern Autonomy Violations under the EU Digital Services Act},
  year = {2025},
  month = jul,
  publisher = {Association of Computing Machinery},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2025 Designing Interactive Systems Conference},
  location = {<conf-loc>, <city>Funchal, Madeira</city>, <country>Portugal</country>, </conf-loc>},
  url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3715668.3736336}
}

Ind. L. J.

Dark Patterns as Design Loyalty

Johanna Gunawan, Woodrow Hartzog, Neil Richards, and 2 more authors

In Indiana University Law Journal Symposium Issue, Jul 2025

Bib HTML

@inproceedings{gunawan-2025-ilj,
  title = {Dark Patterns as Design Loyalty},
  author = {Gunawan, Johanna and Hartzog, Woodrow and Richards, Neil and Choffnes, David and Wilson, Christo},
  year = {2025},
  publisher = {Indiana University School of Law},
  booktitle = {Indiana University Law Journal Symposium Issue},
  series = {100 Ind. L. J.},
  volume = {100},
  issue = {4},
  url = {https://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=11577&context=ilj},
}