introduction to "dark patterns" in design

Really bad marketing practices are already illegal (like reducing the mileage of a used car...). Those highlighted don't look bad enough and basically the customer can spot all of them. Public shame is much more harmful, indeed Ryanair, for the bad overall experience it offers, is already at the bottom of my flight companies list.

In my opinion the big question as always is, who decides what is "legal" and what is "illegal". People might have very different opinions about how capable others are of understanding what they click on or not. And as long as you don't install some design police which decides what is ethical and not, the most likely result is, that the TOS are just going to get amended with further warnings and disclaimers.

Try banning practices like this and you'll end up with over-general regulations that ban a lot of things that should be legal. When the government find itself with overly broad statutes, it frequently ends up applying them selectively, based on whatever criteria it chooses. This often ends up being based on things like race, or whether you're engaging in speech the government doesn't like, or whether you're engaged in activities that a politician's donors don't like (something a lot of startups like to do).

Even if you can define the problem precisely so it is not too broad, in order to prevent arbitrary enforcement you would have to place a huge regulatory burden on either a government agency or website owners (or both). Every website that sells anything would have to register with the government(s) of whatever jurisdictions apply, and file reports showing that they are meeting the requirements. Then you run into problems regarding who is responsible for user generated content -- it goes on and on.

For some particularly egregious types of fraud, these downsides can be worth it, but you have to be careful what you choose to regulate.

It is redundant. Sufficiently dark patters would be considered fraud as for those not that bad, well one might shop elsewhere.

Refer to the UNIX Programming Environment:

    UNIX does not stop the user from doing stupid things,
    as that would also prevent them from doing clever things.

Apply s/stupid/bad and s/clever/good and you have my view on this issue.

Also, as others have pointed out, the most egregious cases are already considered fraud, and therefore illegal. I see no reason to make further laws.

As always the unintended consequences.

Why does a user buying an extra iPad case constitute something that needs to be banned by law, isn't it covered by caveat emptor?

If government can mandate people to buy insurance what's wrong with a company putting insurance as a default? Perhaps instead of making defaults companies should petition the government to make such coverage mandatory.

Haven't consumers shown their preferences by continuing to do business with these companies?

I'm more conservative than libertarian, but I'd argue that since laws generally have unintended, often negative consequences, the bar has to be pretty high before establishing a new law.

I'd also argue that in America, there's far too many laws on the books already that criminalize trivial behavior conducted without criminal intent. That plus prosecutors more interested in winning than justice equals prison time for people who accidentally failed to follow an obscure regulation.

Many of those 'dark patterns' could easily be implemented inadvertently and without malice. If I flub my product design and accidentally make my email opt-out options confusing, I deserve a little negative feedback, not jail time.

I'm not a libertarian, but I do find laws to be applied arbitrarily at times. For instance, I live in a place where sharpies are banned in public areas. Local police use anti-vandalism as an excuse to stop and search anyone who looks like they are under the age of 20.

You can't fix it that way, they'll just link to the app on the store and ask you to review it. And there's no way Apple will block opening App Store links.

I didn't see Appirater in the link nor did a search on website reveal anything. I am concerned that my users may feel requesting a review in the App Store after 10 uses and/or 10 days to be unethical, but I cannot figure out what reasons they may have for doing so. Do you have any reasons this may be unethical?

Where do you live? In April of this year, I had to change my state to Illinois in order to enable the link to cancel via the browser. Illinois requires companies to provide a cancel link, so MS does. But they didn't offer it where they didn't have to.

I believe this was doable in [ed: parts of - it seems] the US well before they got around to implementing it elsewhere, like in the UK.

It wasn't until some time last year that there was even a 'cancel' button on your profile. I think it may have been around the same time they added PayPal support.

I wouldn't trust my card details with them again, considering the liberties they took with that data (that were all buried in the small print).

This used to drive me nuts, since I only play online sporadically -- having to sit on the phone for 15 minutes to cancel was ridiculous. They've changed it now, but there's still the mild trick of re-engaging the auto-renewal every time you sign up again for a month.

I don't mean to be rude but the whole point was that a service that is going to offer monthly subscriptions should make it clear from before you enter the CC details that you are buying a monthly automatically paid subscription.

The first version of this site was published in October 2010.