Hall of shame

Despite repeatedly declining access to notifications and contacts, TikTok persistently asks for these permissions. This persistence is an example of the "nagging" dark pattern, designed to tire users until they give up and allow access. Let’s break down the tactics TikTok uses to achieve this.

TradingView uses several dark patterns to influence your decision and make you feel guilty about cancelling your subscription.

The Roach Motel dark pattern has definitely been a hit over the last several seasons. More big companies continue to exploit this pattern for their subscription cancellation. Today, let's review the DoorDash DashPass cancellation process. These steps reveal several dark patterns designed to make you think twice about cancelling.

The Roach Motel dark pattern is a common tactic to make it harder for users to cancel their subscription. HelloFresh uses this strategy to lower their cancellation rates. However, those who fail to cancel now will likely try again when the charge appears next month.

When you're ready to complete your purchase at Green Man Gaming, you see various payment options and a cart summary. Everything looks straightforward until you spot a small checkbox at the bottom of the page. It says, "Please tick this box if you do not want to receive wishlist offers, vouchers, and other deals via email."

The vast world of online user experience is filled with numerous tactics used by companies to guide user behavior. However, not all of these tactics prioritize the user's best interests. Dark patterns, which are deceptive design choices that trick users into taking actions they might not have intended to, are becoming increasingly prevalent.

"Hey folks. Ive been featured in this news article about a in Urban Company (an Indian Startup). Do give it a read if this is interesting for you"

"TikTok violated the DSA - again. We found: 48 NEW murky accounts impersonating Clin Georgescu 49 political ads, violating TikTok's own policy They were easy to find. So why wasnt TikTok proactive?"

In the intricate web of online user experiences, websites often use subtle tactics to guide user behavior. One such tactic that stands out in its manipulativeness is Confirmshaming. Today, we look at how this tactic plays out in real-world scenarios and its implications for online shoppers.

"I don't use Word often, but when I do, it's because I have to. A few days ago I notice the Save function now defaults to OneDrive. I've no idea when that started, but it's NOT what I want and fixing that up every time I save is another unnecessary, but deliber..."

Came across this “confirmshaming” dark pattern in the Indigo app when I was booking a flight. That’s when it “present users with opt-out labels that are worded in a derogatory or belittling manner, making users feel bad about choosing not to engage with the offered service”

TIL: Crazy dark pattern for Google Workspace - it WILL not let me select the cheaper pricing plan when I'm signing up. After some research, I found out you have to signup for the expensive free trial and then search for the option to downgrade to the cheaper pricing plan.

Meta’s new “consent” wall is scam that undermines the European Court of Justice’s ruling of July. This deceptive design pushes the user to “consent” to unrestricted use of their data. That includes intimate data that Meta obtains by tracking the user on other websites and apps.

@harrybr #darkpatterns I got charged £83.88 after a 7 day trial after clicking this. Wasn't expecting to be charged up front, but missed the PREPAID FOR ONE YEAR caveat

Microsoft has started showing a fullscreen pop-up for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III when you boot up an Xbox today

Eric July lists the prices to his "Mack Club", but makes the "monthly" recurring label the same color as the background of the site, tricking users into entering a monthly subscription without realizing it.

Orders without tips included ahead of time look less lucrative to drivers, meaning you might be waiting longer.

@darkpatterns Classic dark pattern from @movehub

Mystery over @IndiGo 's clever seat-purchase ploy unraveled. While the seat selection is not compulsory, following are the ways the airline has tried to benefit from confusing travellers through deliberate omission. I explain below

Deceptive UX practices at @Porkbun during the approval process for an outgoing domain transfer.

Dark pattern of the day. Samsung sent me a notification to accept the new terms and conditions. The form was designed in a way to trick you to accept all the terms, including optional marketing ones... took me ages to find out how I can change my answers...

Twitter is now slowing down traffic on links to the crowdfunding site Patreon, WhatsApp, and at times, Meta’s Messenger app, a Markup analysis confirms.

Talk about a unwelcome UX dark pattern @samcartapp pulls when you try to unsubscribe & deactivate. Forces you to watch a video to cancel (and not to mention an addition confirmation step after that). Got to reduce churn, but I hate it from a user satisfaction standpoint.

Stripe is a great product but also employs a massive dark pattern. It's almost impossible to know how much you pay monthly to use Stripe. There are bunch of reports you can try to download to analyze fees, but as you turn on their additional services (Revenue Recognition, Sigma, etc) it's basically impossible to see a breakdown of what you're paying. If people easily saw what they paid Stripe monthly (spoiler alert, it's a lot), I bet Stripe would have more competitors.

The ol' one-two mixed opt-in opt-out dark pattern from the fork . com

Yesterday, GameStop was sued in a class action alleging that it sneaks shipping & handling charges into customers' carts at checkout. Consumers say they selected "FREE Shipping" but were charged for it anyway. They seek at least $5M in damages.

Be extremely cautious/avoid investing in Navi Mutual Funds @navifinance @_sachinbansal They have suddenly made it mandatory to share your contacts and location with them to access your funds at all. Can't even withdraw. Complete breach of trust and privacy. Figuring out where to complain but I'm taking my investments away from them for sure. And they say they need it "for best offers" 🙄

How to lose my trust: - mess with the order of plans and break the left -> right' convention and try to get me for the most expensive option - imply I can start for free while the only option is to purchase a plan.

Twitter / X is serving users with a new ad format that can't be blocked or reported the ads aren't even actual X posts & aren't connected to any X accounts. they do not disclose that they are ads it appears the ads are connected to clickbait ad networks

Here is the full draft decision and commitments. Strongly recommend reading and sharing. I’ve long said U.S. enforcers should mirror this check on market power. It’s 30 pages clearly explaining G’s surveillance and dark patterns and how to fix them

My $400 baby monitor has locked previously free features behind a monthly subscription. The app used to send push notifications when the baby woke up. Now I have to pay $10 per month for that privilege

"Despite using neutral language that specifically did not mention integrating deceptive design patterns, every single AI-generated web page contained at least one such pattern, with an average of five per page."

A leading campaigner against Meta’s data practices said he would fight the proposals “up and down the courts” if the subscription fees were implemented

This is such a dark pattern by Amazon. They make it look like getting a refund to your original form of payment is not an option. Even though it is an option below but is not treated the same as other options.

so sick and tired of these dark patterns in consent management platform tools. 'Reject All' does not reject all. You have to click on legitimate interests and 'object all'. That this is on the website of a consumer advice centre is just 🙇‍♀️🙇‍♀️🙇‍♀️🙇‍♀️

TDG offered consumers products at inflated regular prices and then marketed the products at big discounts giving misleading impression that consumers were savings on those products. The Bureau found that TDG advertised urgent, limited time offers to consumers, including using tactics like countdown timers.

It's a dark pattern to force your users, actually, your customers to agree with receiving promotional emails when they buy from you. There's no way to disagree with it except by not buying plane tickets from @AirCanada . I wonder if it's legal in Canada...

Amazon’s ongoing pattern of illegal conduct blocks competition, allowing it to wield monopoly power to inflate prices, degrade quality, and stifle innovation

Guess what the billing period is for this Adobe license, as displayed on this "review your order" screen that appears before you commit? If you guessed "annual", you'd be correct, for some dumb reason. Adobe have really weaponised dark patterns in a truly user-hostile manner.

@BundleHunt Eh, that's a bit of a sneaky dark pattern 🤔

This call to action is utterly disingenuous. It looks like you're being invited to add 2FA for security reasons. It's actually an advertisement for Twitter Blue (or whatever they're calling it these days).

Convenience Fee for a membership @peyushbansal @Lenskart_com I would probably buy your membership at 49. Why do you have to switch and bait? I don’t care how sophisticated your app is, after this, you’ll be one of those companies that does scammy shit, for me at least.

Does your ecom site use fake slashed prices, perpetual discounts, and/or countdown timers that reset? Select Blinds did. Now, they're paying $10M to settle a class action lawsuit filed in California.

Wow @kayak going hard on the Dark Patterns when I try to disable some push notifications and a magical ghost just pops them back on 👻

IMO push notifications should not have the same copy as system functions. I also had not ordered anything. I saw this and thought someone was trying to call me and then realised it’s just a random notification.

Dark patterns are another issue. By default, ChatGPT users allow OpenAI to use their data for model training, exposing them to memorization risks. The opt-out interfaces unnecessarily link privacy with reduced functionality, and the more flexible control is hard to find and use.

Holy moly. This is actual fraud and I found that @Swiggy is doing this even for me! Here's my last order and it adds up to 255.60. But they charge 259? This stinks. It can't be some random error, it seems to be on purpose to add rs. 3 extra. What's going on?

"Use this activity" is an unusual choice of words, huh. (screenshot from @facebook yesterday)

@darkpatterns this double-negative is a classic by now, thx @fotor_com

Mastercard knows where you shop, on what day, and how much you spend - and it sells that data widely to third parties like data brokers and advertisers. Our new investigation out today

"The network technology giant Cisco offers to turn Wi-Fi access points installed in offices and other buildings into a system that tracks the location of employees, customers, smartphones, laptops and other devices for a wide range of purposes I took a deep div..."

Big time dark pattern by @MeetApollo when trying to cancel on their monthly self-serve plan. Cancel Plan button triggers a bot chat in order to cancel and then they don't respond 😑 @darkpatterns

It doesn't get more "sludge" than LearnDesk. Trying to cancel my account for the past 3 years. Now I finally get these instructions with a screen shot. Well, the "delete account" button does not exist on my profile.

Twitter not marking ads as ads any more. I was wondering why this craptastic tweet was showing up in my TL. (It was an ad, just not marked as such)

TikTok fined €345 million and ordered to become legally compliant within 3 months. “The fine relates to non-private settings, lack of transparency and use of dark patterns.” 🙌

Tech giant ‘continued to collect and store a user’s location data’ even if users turned off their location history, according to suit

Every year, Adobe sends me an email notifying me that they will increase the price of Creative Cloud from €29,99 to €52,06 per month (+44%!). And every year, I take the same steps to keep my old price: I pretend that I want to cancel my plan, stating it's "too expensive," and in the end, they offer a "special deal" for €29,99 for another full year.

What happens when a genius PM & UX designer work together at Notion? 👇 Backstory, I got $910 credits from Stripe Atlas to try out Notion. Cool, who doesn't like free credits! Finally, I used up all the credits and got charged $90. So I decided the party was over, let's downgrade the plan to free. But for some odd reason, the account is set to yearly, instead of monthly without my consent (Notion manually approves and applies the credit), and once I used up my credits. BOOOOM! My next invoice is set for Feb 2024 for a whopping $2,150.

The MarkUp has built a tool to see how much Twitter is throttling links to various sites. Conclusion - it’s doing it to all it’s competitors.

"By clicking above, you can join our partner programme for 15 pounds/month and claim your reward." This dialog is styled to look like part of the first party payment process, but in fact it's an advertisement for http://completesavings.co.uk.

This is @InsuranceYoga . You see this after you request to cancel automatic renewal. You're also required to enter a cancellation reason in a free text field. Viewing the discount takes you out of the cancellation journey - you have to start again if unhappy with the discount.

You can't use @Bluebirdgroup app unless you turn on OS notifications.

@Programiz disabled the input and button on the unsubscribe page to prevent users from unsubscribing!? check it out at this link: https://programiz.pro/unsubscribe @darkpatterns

Forced arbitration clauses are a fancy way for companies to force customers to waive their right to go to court when they’re cheated. And @JPMorgan @Chase just snuck them back into the fine print of their credit cards.

So @JPMorgan @Chase is forcing me into forced arbitration to sign into my account online. Anybody else seeing that?

I can't believe this dark pattern is still being used by @amazon . If you're quickly clicking it looks like this button provides two options - continuing with Amazon Prime or continuing with normal delivery. If you do click this button by accident, you'll be automatically subscribed to Amazon Prime. There is no easy way to undo the subscription. So gross.

Pausing your @onepeloton membership is really made to be a painful experience. Making you re-setup the bike to use basic functionality like you just formatted it. Plus the dark patterns just to change your membership.

Dark patterns in privacy. There are at least 3 problems with this EU-based cookie banner, can you spot them?

‘This process is annoying enough the first time, but at some point down the line, you'll also be offered […] the "second chance out-of-box experience," , which will try to get you to do all of this stuff again if you skipped some of it the first time.’

Just found out that if you want to delete a Facebook Group you're in charge of, you have to manually remove every member one-by-one until you're the last one left, and then you have the option to remove/delete it. This is insanely asinine. 😠

just got hit with my first surprise @figma billing where it added two editors to my bill and charged automatically when all I did was give them file permissions on one file. wild to me how a company who does so much good for the community still hasn’t fixed this dark pattern

Adalytics alleges that YouTube appears to set long-lasting cookies specifically for users who are watching videos labeled "for kids." It also suggested that serves “targeted ads on YouTube videos that are clearly labeled as 'for kids.'"

Wall Street Journal requires it users to go on a date with a reporter to cancel its subscription

Skype is sending this notification once per day. For a communications app to abuse notifications in this way is unconscionable. Of course I can’t turn them off. I just have to endure the abuse. Absolute shame on Skype and Microsoft.

Here's yet another class action about fake "sale" prices. Remember: using fake reference prices to run sales is illegal under the FTC Act and California's laws. This time, ecommerce wallet brand Ekster is in the crosshairs:

Coglode Cures - Interactive Behavioural Remedies

disappointed by the dark patterns I've encountered over at @spaceship ! pretty weak that you built the ability to upgrade your account but not downgrade.

You can choose to turn on your watch history to get recommended videos, or stick with a simpler home page.

Norway's data privacy watchdog has fined Meta $6.8 million for violating users' privacy by using their personal data to target ads as it failed to get users' consent to use data about their interests to serve them personalized ads.

Users agree to allow Zoom to access and use their Service Generated Data for various purposes, including product development, marketing, analytics, and improving their services, in accordance with applicable laws and this Agreement.

Pay no attention to the USB port behind the “no USB” sticker. Is covering a printer’s USB port with a sticker to push people into wireless printing the worst thing HP does with its hardware? Not remotely.

A double whammy of deceptive patterns from webuyanyphone.com. First, a countdown timer pressuring you to "secure this value" by checking out quickly. Second, a £5 bonus if you sign up for a "free trial" of McAfee, which sets up a recurring subscription. cc: @darkpatterns

This is ridiculous and I hate when companies throw dark patterns at their users to try and trick them into staying subscribed to apps. Very uncool, @Scribd

Enough with the BS dark patterns! @TheAthletic cc: @darkpatterns

I thought the unsubscribe button might have been black on black but… there is literally none! @figma @darkpatterns

3/n Next I dealt with @British_Airways deceptive design pattern approach to pushing surveillance cookies (misleading emphasis) cc @darkpatterns #UI #fail

The 'Ad' icon placement and wording has changed on Twitter. Because your eye usually automatically scans to the place where it used to be, it's easier to get scammed at the moment by ads like this. Worth being a bit more careful than usual.

Hei, @comcast / @Xfinity can we stop with the dark patterns? I just want to cancel service, I don't care to chat with your agents and your bot is just a loop. Just stop the service already.

1/Hello @Daily_Express I notice you're using dark patterns in a dire 'cookie' notice. (a) Defaulted to 'I accept' which would trigger NINE HUNDRED & TEN third party 'partners (b) Clicking 'More options' takes you to window showing a number of purposes set to 'OFF' & a choice of

This is some creepy dark pattern bullshit from @kpthrive . They're using the legally required language to threaten people into allowing them to profit of health data sales and sharing by making it seem as though you are somehow giving up HIPAA protections in order to protect data

Trying to skip a month of @humble Choice is a cacophony of @darkpatterns . Too many steps, alternating button colors to trick you into clicking the wrong thing, inconsistent language, etc.

new dark pattern dropped. Cant cancel your @Crunchyroll account if you replace the cancel button with a "keep subscription" button! X should do this, seems effective.

@darkpatterns Nonsensical unsubscribe button and check boxes. Am I unsubscribing by checking or subscribing? (Specscart)

We should boycott companies like @Dominos_UK that use these kinds of predatory schemes to try and trick people into subscriptions they don't need. Frankly this should be illegal. Especially the dark pattern that makes it look at a glance like it's part of the order process.

""Catalog of Dark Patterns Discover a variety of dark pattern examples, sorted by category, to better understand deceptive design practices.""

. @PerkinsCoieLLP shares details of the $18.5M settlement Publishers Clearing House reached w/ @FTC following allegations of deceptive practices, such as the use of #dark patterns to encourage #sweepstakes entries and purchases. #ConsumerProtection

. @Shutterstock is seriously the worst. I didn’t even know I signed up for an annual sub the way they do dark patterns in their checkout, now they try to hold you hostage by paying $60 to cancel? I haven’t used this in 4 months you got way more than your $60. Awful service.

6/ It really is important to understand that if a person selects 'More Options' then 'Reject All', then 'Save & Exit', those action do NOT disable the 'Legitimate Interest' purposes. A person would need to select 'Legitimate Interest' then select 'OBJECT ALL' & 'Save & Exit'

@darkpatterns get a load of this slimy shit

The Norwegian data protection authority is issuing a ban on Meta's use of surveillance-based advertising. Happy to see some actual enforcement of the GDPR!