How online companies strive to keep your money and data when you try to leave.
Have you signed up to an online service for a free trial, decided it isn’t for you, but still ended up paying for it months – or even years – later? Or tried cancelling a subscription, and found yourself giving up during the painstaking process? If so, there’s a good chance you have encountered a “dark pattern”.
For instance, the FTC is currently investigating Amazon over its alleged use of dark patterns to enrol customers into its Prime service, while making it difficult for them to leave. Our research supports the agency’s observation that “consumers who attempted to cancel Prime were faced with multiple steps to actually accomplish the task of cancelling”.
Meanwhile, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority recently announced its first investigation into dark patterns with an open letter warning business against what it calls “harmful online choice architectures”. Rather than helping consumers, the architecture is designed to hinder choice. So instead of removing irrelevant material, it may bombard a user with excessive information, extra steps and distractions to stop them cancelling a subscription.
With these risks in mind, we have used insights from behavioural science to identify some of the processes which make dark patterns work and created a simple framework to describe the most pervasive strategies. “Detours” for example, is the name we have given to the tools used to delay and distract us, such as requiring an excessive number of actions to cancel a subscription.
And it should not be drastically more straightforward to set up a social media account than it is to delete it. There is no good reason for detours, roundabouts and shortcuts to get in the way. We believe it should be as easy – if not easier – to delete an account as it is to create one. Most of the services we examined failed this standard.
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