Anyone who’s tried to close an Amazon account knows that breaking up is hard to do. The instructions are buried under a help menu, and once you track them down, you learn there’s no way to complete the process on your own. You need to contact customer service to get the job done.
It’s not just Amazon. Websites large and small often choose designs that make it difficult and time-consuming to limit data collection, choose strong privacy settings, or simply stop receiving marketing emails.
Privacy experts call design elements such as hard-to-find buttons and confusing menus “dark patterns” when they seem to manipulate consumers unfairly. Harry Brignull, a designer who is credited with coining the phrase, maintains a “Hall of Shame” where people have contributed screenshots from organizations as diverse as PayPal, National Geographic, Quora, and a company that sells first-aid kits.
Woodrow Hartzog, a Northeastern University professor of law and computer science, examines dark patterns in his book “Privacy’s Blueprint” (Harvard University Press, 2018). “In the aggregate,” he says, the practice “amounts to this collective machine that is trying to extract every ounce of data and value from us.”
Dark patterns aren’t always intentionally misleading, says Cliff Kuang, author of the forthcoming book “User Friendly” (Virgin Digital, 2019) and a product designer at Google, who was not speaking on behalf of the company. “There are lots of reasons that dark patterns happen, some of which are inattention, some of which are just institutional drift, some of which are malicious, and some of which are shortsightedness,” he says.