How Companies Trick You Into Paying Them More Money With Dark Patterns

You likely wouldn’t be surprised to hear that most companies don’t have your interest at heart. For-profit companies are designed to maximize profit and some of the ways they do this are malicious at best and scams at worst.

One of the usual ways companies try to get more money from their users is by using dark patterns. A dark pattern, or deceptive design pattern, is a part of a company’s user interface that misleads users into taking an action, whether it is done on purpose or not.

Even well-respected companies, such as the New York Times and Amazon, use dark patterns. A 2019 Princeton study scanned through 11,000 shopping websites to check for dark patterns and discovered that 1,818 of the sites employed these deceptive techniques.

What Dark Patterns Do They Use?

Caroline Sinders, a journalist with the popular digital publication The Pudding, subscribed and unsubscribed to 16 popular services to see what kinds of dark patterns they were using. Sinders chose platforms with free trials and subscriptions because she noted that they were often the most egregious.

Sinders claimed that she found 20 different dark patterns across all 16 platforms.

She noted that Amazon and shopping site Savage Fenty both added subscriptions by default when some items were added to the cart. This is a dark pattern that bets on users not noticing the subscription was added until after the purchase goes through.

One of the most common tricks she discovered was websites making it hard to find the cancel option for subscription services. She found that Express VPN, Daily Harvest, and Vimeo all obscure (whether on purpose or not) the option by placing it behind different settings pages or altering the name so it wasn’t obvious what it meant.

For example, Express VPN has no ‘cancel’ option in its settings anywhere. Instead, you have to find the ‘auto-renew’ page and click to cancel your subscription. This kind of dark pattern is simply designed to make it as hard as legally possible for users to unsubscribe from their site.

The New York Times uses a similar and likely more effective dark pattern that keeps users from unsubscribing. It forces users to call a customer service number or chat with a customer service representative to cancel their subscription. The Boston Globe, Savage Fenty, Xfinity and many other companies employ the same (or a similar) tactic.

How to Avoid Falling For Dark Patterns

The only way to avoid falling for most dark patterns is to think critically and stay vigilant. When you are shopping online, watch out for dark patterns like the ones described above. Keep an eye out for other dark patterns like fake sales and countdown timers as well.

For dark patterns that make canceling more difficult, invest the extra time to eliminate the additional cost, as it’s usually worth the effort.

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