On November 30, 2023, the Central Consumer Protection Authority issued guidelines for the regulation and prevention of Dark Patterns.
Dark patterns are tricks used by applications and websites to make users do things they don’t want to, relying on exploiting our behavioural biases and cognitive limitations. These guidelines published by the Central Consumer Protection Authority cover 13 types of dark patterns such as;
“False Urgency” means falsely stating or implying a sense of urgency or scarcity so as to mislead a user into making an immediate purchase or taking an immediate action, which may lead to a purchase.
“Basket sneaking” means inclusion of additional items such as products, services, payments to charity or donation at the time of checkout from a platform, without the consent of the user, such that the total amount payable by the user is more than the amount payable for the product or service chosen by the user.
“Confirm shaming” means using a phrase, video, audio or any other means to create a sense of fear or shame or ridicule or guilt in the mind of the user so as to nudge the user to act in a certain way that results in the user purchasing a product or service from the platform or continuing a subscription of a service.
“Forced action” mean forcing a user into taking an action that would require the user to buy any additional goods or subscribe or sign up for an unrelated service or share personal information in order to buy or subscribe to the product or service originally intended by the user.
“Subscription trap” which makes the process of cancelling a subscription complex and lengthy.
“Interface interference” means a design element that manipulates the user interface in ways that (a) highlights certain specific information; and (b) obscures other relevant information relative to the other information; to misdirect a user from taking an action as desired.
“Bait and switch” means the practice of advertising a particular outcome based on the user’s action but deceptively serving an alternate outcome.
“Drip pricing” a tactic where full prices are hidden or revealed late in the purchase process, such as adding costs post-confirmation, advertising free services that later require payment, or blocking access to paid services unless extra is bought.
“Disguised advertisement” means a practice of posing, masking advertisements as other types of content such as user-generated content or new articles or false advertisements, which are designed to blend in with the rest of an interface in order to trick customers into clicking on them.
“Nagging” means a dark pattern practice due to which a user is disrupted and annoyed by repeated and persistent interactions, in the form of requests, information, options, or interruptions, to effectuate a transaction and make some commercial gains, unless specifically permitted by the user.
“Trick Question” means the deliberate use of confusing or vague language like confusing wording, double negatives, or other similar tricks, in order to misguide or misdirect a user from taking desired action or leading a consumer to take a specific response or action.
“Saas billing” refers to the process of generating and collecting payments from consumers on a recurring basis in a software as a service (SaaS) business model by exploiting positive acquisition loops in recurring subscriptions to get money from users as surreptitiously as possible.
“Rogue Malwares” means using ransomware or scareware to mislead or trick users into believing there is a virus on their computer and aims to convince them to pay for a fake malware removal tool that actually installs malware on their computer.
We hosted a conversation on this topic with Ashish Aggarwal (head of public policy at NASSCOM) and Kailash Nadh (CTO at Zerodha) when the government released the consultation paper back in September 2023, on regulating dark patterns, which you can watch below:
You can check out the highlights and the full transcript of this conversation here:
motivating users to “do the right thing”
exploiting users with dark-patterns