What are dark patterns, and how do they affect you?
Dark patterns can be dangerous and manipulative
Why dark patterns matter
The inability to unsubscribe from service results in a specific monetary harm: It makes people spend money they didn’t intend to. But dark patterns can cause other kinds of harm, as well.
These can take the form of emotional manipulation, like when a site places a countdown clock on an offer to accelerate a customer’s decision-making, even though time has no bearing on the sale or the use of the product or service. Or the harm could be the loss of privacy, as when an app forces users to turn off data collection in two different settings instead of making privacy settings easy to find.
Apower imbalanceexists between users and organizations, which makes it nearly impossible for individuals to always protect themselves from deceptive design practices. We created I, Obscura to help educate web users about the possibilities.
Consumer protection is important, as well. TheFederal Trade Commissionand state attorneys general have enforced consumer protection regulations against organizations that use deceptive design practices, especially those with apps thattarget children. It is important for policymakers to prohibit the use of dark patterns and to require organizations to make interactions as transparent and simple as possible.
Article byJasmine McNealy, Assistant Professor of Telecommunication,University of Florida
This article is republished fromThe Conversationunder a Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article.
Story byThe Conversation
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