Dark patterns: tricks to make you spend more online
Dark patterns are tactics websites or apps use to nudge, manipulate or trick you into spending more money than you’d planned or providing personal data that’s not needed.
Hidden 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 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.
