Have you ever tried to cancel a subscription service, or withdraw online consent, only to find yourself in a maze of never-ending submenus that seems like it was dreamed up by MC Escher himself?
It only took a few seconds to sign up for this service, but now you’ve spent 45 minutes clicking around only to find that you have to get a representative on the phone to cancel your $14.99/mo service, and they’re experiencing “higher call volume than normal” so you may need to be patient.
While this may seem like simple poor customer service, make no mistake, it’s an intentional poor user experience– in fact, it’s often considered a best practice.
We’ve all experienced them. Online user experiences that are designed to make our lives harder. As regulations designed to protect consumer data and guarantee online rights proliferate, so do these so-called “dark patterns”—UI designs intended to subvert these regulations by frustrating user experience and guiding users towards actions and outcomes that may not be in their best interest.
Now, dark patterns have come under more scrutiny than ever, as the Federal Trade Commission warns that it is investigating what it calls Negative Option Marketing — the FTC’s term for dark patterns that take consumers’ silence as implicit consent for situations like subscription renewals and free trials that will begin billing automatically after expiration.
But what, exactly, are dark patterns? To better understand the FTC’s warning, let’s take a look at some common examples of dark patterns and how these UX choices affect compliance with data privacy regulations like the GDPR and CCPA.
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What are Dark Patterns?
Dark patterns are essentially user experience (UX) tricks that websites and apps use to discourage certain actions, deliberately obscure information, or mislead users.
The term was first coined in 2010 by UX specialist Harry Brignull, who went on to launch DarkPatterns.Org to name and shame perpetrators, but the practice has been going on much longer than that.
For example, burying unpopular stipulations inside lengthy terms of service agreements that few — if any — consumers ever read is a dark pattern that is as old or older as the internet itself.
The FTC, the California Consumer Protection Act (CCPA), and the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) all require…