Dark Patterns at Scale: Findings from a Crawl of 11K Shopping Websites (2019)
webtransparency.cs.princeton.edu
webtransparency.cs.princeton.edu
After hunting through the site, it appears easy to add, but impossible to remove licenses without going through sales support (instant response with a human), who then transfer you to the "Cancellation Team" which are remarkably hard to find online and have not replied to previous attempts at cancellation.
This is my third try, and the wait has been ridiculous. After finally being connected to a member of their cancellation team, they are "reviewing my request" and 1-2 minutes (please stand by) has turned into 15+
This experience has been so bad (on top of many others), that I'm strongly considering moving our entire org to open source tools (aside from InDesign for the publications group, which our partners require).
Adobe: "Have 3 months free!"
Me: "We are no longer using these licenses."
Adobe: "But you are on the hook for a year. We have reset all of your licenses to have the same annual renewal date, regardless of when you purchased them."
Me: "We are no longer using these licenses. Free months are just a tactic in hopes that we miss the cancellation window and are forced to pay for another year."
Adobe: "We highly recommend that you accept our generous 3 months free offer."
Me: "That sounds a little ominous. Please cancel the licenses, effective immediately."
This is paraphrased, but follows the essential conversation. Adobe, you disappoint me.
This just increases the overall badness in the world.
Unfortunately I do not know the solution; their product is simply good, and the alternatives are all lacking in some ways.
Their new business model feels so invasive.
They offered 3 months free. I asked if they could apply it retroactively since they could see we hadn't used it, and no longer needed it. Bit of a crazy request, but they did it!
We donate to various projects: on Github, FSF, EFF, direct to a developers, and even Patreon in one case.
Autodesk had our money for a while, then we moved to use and support Blender and never looked back.
... we even bought a license to WinRAR, I kid you not.
Mentioning WinRAR was a bit of a joke.
I thought the advantage of subscription software is that you don't need to pay an expensive one time fee if you need software just for a short project. But if they make it hard to cancel, that really sucks.
I'm so glad I moved away from Adobe...
You've most likely got yearly licences that you pay off monthly, which means you can only modify on a yearly basis, so they don't let you modify most of the year.
Give the Affinity [1] suite a serious look. It's not Photoshop or Illustrator, but for many users it really is a functional alternative and much of the tooling works similarly enough that it's usable (unlike much of the OSS stuff which just gets maddening). Pricing is also very sane.
I suspect they don't want to end up on the wrong side of a crowdsource shitlist for penalizing people during the pandemic.
If it weren't for Amazon's dominance, other sites would be able to compete without resorting to these dark patterns, so this is a self-perpetuating cycle: people only shop on Amazon -> the only other sites that can survive are the ones that engage in deception -> trust in non-Amazon shopping sites decreases -> people only shop on Amazon -> ...
I don't mean to cast these scammy shopping websites as victims. My concern is more about how the legitimate sites that could exist don't because they're crowded out by Amazon (and other big players like Walmart) and the scammy shopping sites this article discusses.
These terms are getting a bit out of hand XD
I’d wager that many of the dark patterns persist because Amazon use them, making their justification inside smaller companies easier.
I dont have prime and the whole UI is set up to trick me into getting prime.
I always buy enough to get free shipping (which they show with a big banner), but it always defaults to paid shipping, that often needs to be removed item by item.
More often than not, books I search for default to kindle, and I have actually been tricked into buying a kindle version before.
They hide the fact that you are buying from a reseller as much as they can.
I could go on, but the point is I agree with you entirely.
Amazon Prime on the other hand is definitely a dark pattern.
Amazon is incredibly good at converting consumer surveillance data in to money. They could easily default this (and many other things) to sensible per-user values. Given their competence and attention to detail, the reasonable guess here is that playing dumb on this default pays better than doing right by the user.
At this point you couldn't switch back.
Back when I was still in college they offered a "6 month trial" of Prime Student. I agreed, made a mental note to cancel it in 5 months, and was shocked to find the next day that my card had been charged. There weren't any purchase screens, any terms to agree to, or anything to indicate that the trial they were peddling was in fact just an ordinary Prime Student subscription which would then renew in 6 months.
I mean, it says Sold by X and Fulfilled by Amazon right under the add to basket/buy buttons. It's repeated on the order summary. I'm aware people keep missing this, but I don't really get it.
Why is this not obvious to us? It wasn't to me either. There has got to be some cognitive bias at play here to lead to our acceptance of inverted principles like this. The framing of the problem is completely inverted, yet we're pretty much okay with that.
If it's not clear what I'm talking about here's another example:
"Why do you need privacy if you have nothing to hide?"
This is also a reframing that presumes I do not have privacy and therefore bare the burden to prove I need it. People accept this frame and attempt to argue it directly all the time, when they should really just say "Why do you need to take it?" The burden of proof is on the taker.
Neither the buyer nor the seller should be so accepting of Amazon's attempt to obfuscate the actual parties involved in the sale. Amazon is just the payment processor and possibly providing storage and shipping services.
A real world analogy would be if every store that accepts VISA looked like a VISA store.
You are buying this from X. Amazon is only processing the payment.
And there's probably a way to word that even more clearly...
This can't really be something Amazon is intentionally trying to trick you into doing. There's no way for you not to notice that it happened, and you can just return the kindle book.
In general you just need to change it for each shipment - if multiple items are grouped together [because they're all at the same warehouse) then changing one shipment will change the shipping speed of all items within it. They probably should be defaulting to free shipping when it's available, though.
I'm definitely overestimating my own ability to avoid Amazon's scammy tactics. I, like most people, am reluctant to admit that I'm vulnerable to manipulation by things like these dark patterns (and ads, PR, etc.). But since I'm talking about my subjective feelings towards the websites, I think how good I _feel_ I am is relevant.
I totally agree with everything you've said, but just want to clarify my initial comment. I'm not trying to let Amazon off the hook, though they are less problematic than almost all of the other examples in the article.
They walk the line between selling to customers and selling customers.
Over time, there are more and more "sponsored" results occluding and confusing my search results.
There are now warranty upsell screens on just about every purchase ("would you like coverage on your $5 part?")
They don't offer you the lowest cost on an item, you really have to drill down into all the offers to check.
If you block part of their site, things don't work - but if you sign in, all is well.
Can you delete your browsing history? Well, no. You can "hide" your browsing history but "removing items from view".
Search results are peppered with nonsensical results - that you searched for/bought before. I'm pretty sure this is timed with memory decay.
for example if 3 months ago you searched for dishes. Today when you search for computer parts, there might be a dish thrown into the results.
They talk about "free shipping" everywhere, but even if your cart is $500, you are opted-into non-free shipping and must manually select free shipping.
They don't tell you what is being sent in their shipping emails. But you can install their browser plugin and get all the info conveniently.
I think this was introduced in response to google scraping the data from your gmail. But I'll also add to the list of darkness:
Different prices on Alexa VS actually checking the site.
On Alexa, massively prioritising their own brands VS others. (check out Scott Galloway's tests)
They're also a case study on darkpatterns.org for how difficult it is to cancel.
I want to support the local economy, so unless an item is only available on Amazon, I try to avoid buying from them. I've ordered from lots of different online stores in the past few years, and in my experience these dark patters are pretty rare.
Honestly, of the top-x tech companies, Amazon is probably one of the easiest to quit, perhaps after Netflix.
ETA: And oh yeah. Books? Once again, search on shopping.google.com and buy from some small vendor.
Is there any evidence that e-commerce sites were any less scummy before Amazon started competing?
It would be interesting to see where e-commerce would be today if a company as dominant as Amazon never came about. My hypothesis is that people would have more trust in a random shopping site they click on when Googling a product they want to buy, but it's impossible to test that.
It’s interesting though because there still are plenty of scam sites hosted by those platforms, plenty of dark patterns on Amazon too.
You are better at online shopping than I am.
Amazon has tricked me into signing up for Prime twice. First time it was disguised as a shipping option. The second time I'm not sure exactly how they did it.
Well, unsubscribing Amazon videos is a dark pattern too. Not as bad as Adobe, but still.
I've sat in on a few dozen user research sessions for ecommerce. This was qualitative research that included their general shopping habits, and additionally testing new features. The most interesting thing that I learned is that consumers (a) are generally pretty aware of when they're being pressured, and (b) are fine if it's transparent and accurate.
A classic example of this were low-stock notifications. The shoppers were generally okay with being told that something was low stock if that was really true. Many people could name specific items they lost because they were sold out. Some could also name instances of when they had bought something "1 item remaining" and seen it on sale the next day. They preferred having the information because it helped them make an informed decision. It turns out that lots of people browse the same items for a while, and use sales or almost-out-of-stock as a "now or never" moment.
The most interesting user session I ever sat in on was for a countdown timer for a sale ending. The designer refused to design it at first, and then was like, "fine, I'm going to design the hell out of this and then show you in user research that nobody wants this." And then she showed it to 5 people in user research, who were generally okay with it on the condition that it counted down to the actual sale ending. Some said they actually liked knowing, because when they're just looking on their phones they might not be in a good position to buy it, and want to know how much time they have later to get it. They said that they'll often refresh the page to see if the timer resets, because if it starts ticking from the same time, they feel like the site is just scammy and they'll leave.
Anyways, I'm not trying to defend lots of these patterns. Most of them are clearly wrong, and the ones that I mentioned above can also be used to lie and deceive. But I wouldn't put them all together - in my experience, consumers generally want accurate information even if they're aware that the company is doing it to pressure them.
So the ends justify the means if people are okay with it?
But isn't that true of pretty much anything? The problem for shoppers is that it's almost impossible to know if what you're being told is true, and most people have been burned by scummy sales practices too much to trust what a site is telling them since there's usually no way to verify it. Is the stock really low? Is the sale really about to end? How would the shopper know whether it is or whether it's a lie to trick them?
The sites that treat their customers like idiots need to constantly find new victims.
Sites that treat their customers with respect may not have as high conversion rates for new customers, but the existing customers will go there again.
And here's the Bill that became the law:
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...
They are fairly infamous for fishy looking inventory warnings, aggressive push to register/login, cross/up sell, etc.
I've had booking.com tell me "Hurry! There are only x rooms left!" when I've been to the property before, and know that x is a number larger than the entire number of rooms that exist.
Luckily my brain can filter most of the dark patterns.
Also, Perl is apparently the backend, which gives me a bit of nostalgia.
BTW, booking got fined by the Hungarian Watchdog for 6.1 million GBP for these practices [0].
[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-booking-hldg-hungary-idUS...
"Dark patterns" sounds like some cheesy term someone uses when they don't want to admit malice.
allow: news.ycombinator.com
They throughout your time on them send you a spammy marketing email once every 3 to 5 days - the sort of stuff that's everyone ignores. You get one renewal remind amongst all that crap a week before your final month, usually sandwiched between two other mails.
Then when you want to cancel it...there is no easy link to cancel online they way their is to sign up. To top it off, you have to cancel it before that final month before hand by opening up a ticket on their system. Then it's not automatically cancelled, they setup a call to speak to a rep. If you miss that and then you enter your final month - they automatically renew and make you pay for another year up front! Even endless calls with the German call centre does not get a refund for this dark pattern.
TLDR: avoid TeamViewer
- Low-stock Message - when this data is true, I'm very happy to see it. I can say for sure it's true on the nike website, thing have gone out of stock an hour later or after I have ordered it. So I appreciate it when it's true.
- Countdown timers - A countdown timer to the end of a sale seem perfectly reasonable to me. Some sales are quite good and I like to know when they're going to end.
At least in my experience, one gets subscribed to many things they explicitly opted out from. It is very easy to say later if somebody digs to just say yes was clicked instead of no or there was a bug affecting a small portion of their traffic.
I'm left wondering if the authors take advertisements at face value as well?
"After extensive research, we found that the stain could be removed, but not as easily as shown in the TV advert. As academics, we conclude that this is dark and deceptive."
Sounds like Stockholm Syndrome to me?
Interesting...