NSW Fair Trading – Dark Patterns

Summary

What to look out for when shopping onlineHidden costsHidden costs are extra costs you only find out about towards the end of your purchase, or which are made less obvious. They include pre-selected extras you may not want and add-ons presented so you feel you have to buy them.Some hidden costs are even sneakier, such as a pre-selected free trial period for a service that renews automatically if you don’t cancel before it ends - charging your card for an ongoing membership.Trick questionsTrick questions are used to lead you to make choices that are in the business’s interests and not necessarily in yours. They are commonly used for subscriptions, auto-purchase agreements and data collection (particularly those innocent-sounding cookies - information a website stores about you when you visit).For example, if you’re trying to cancel a subscription, you may be faced with a confusing question that asks if you really want to cancel and gives you 2 options: ‘Continue’ or ‘Cancel’. This may be intentionally unclear, where ‘Continue’ means continuing the cancellation process and ‘Cancel’ means stopping the cancellation process. You may then think you’ve cancelled the subscription until you are charged another subscription fee.Similarly, a request to accept website cookies or data collection may have a big, bold button to accept, and a much smaller, discrete ‘Manage your cookies’ link. Or the website may give you the option to accept the cookies or to go to the cookie policy, but never give you the option to opt out of having cookies track your activities.Scarcity cuesScarcity cues are designed to create a fear of missing out, which pushes you to make rushed decisions about buying or spending more than you planned. Examples are countdown timers for shopping carts or notifications about discount prices and low stock e.g. ‘Only 4 left’.Activity notificationsActivity notifications tell you what other people are doing on a website or app e.g. ‘Someone in Oakey just bought the You...