What is a #darkpattern and why is @ftc looking into it? This thread illustrates an example of abusive unfairness that I’m sure you’ll find familiar. This disgraceful conduct is routinely celebrated by the growth hacker and digital marketing community as best practices.
https://twitter.com/justex07/status/1386872268429565952
Learn more about @ftc’s #darkpatterns upcoming workshop by reading @techpolicypress right here techpolicy.press/taking-action-…
#darkpatterns emerge in digital products when dashboards and split tests dominate the decisions at companies. Without incentives, privileges, and/or moral compass to question and challenge abusive design from within, #darkpatterns often expose the dark side of a business model.
Seems reasonable to me that consumers deserve the protections of unambiguous and equal control of starting and stopping a recurring fee. But no, an entire marketing discipline is predicated on designing an abusive asymmetry to impose an unobservable upfront exit cost to services.
They call this retention, fighting churn, net growth, “just sound business quite frankly” whatever jargon helps to obscure how invasively collected data is pushing deceptive practices up to the line of acceptability as far a possible and then some more.
The market doesn’t know what it would be like if recurring costs had to be presented as an unambiguous and equal gesture (easy to start as it is to stop). The market doesn’t know how many customers aren’t starting recurring fees because we just assume stopping will inflict pain.
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