Policy Watch: India bans "dark design patterns"
India becomes a world leader in this regard, ahead of the US and EU.
Hi there,
In the state elections hullabaloo over the last few days, the TV media in particular in India almost entirely missed an incredibly important set of rules issued by one of India’s regulators.
Specifically, the government banned the use of “dark patterns” on e-commerce platforms which intend to deceive customers or manipulate their choices.
On 2 November, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) recently filed suit against Amazon.com in the US, alleging it intended to dupe customers into subscriptions they never sought and then preventing them from escaping the traps they had unwittingly entered:
The FTC and its state partners say Amazon’s actions allow it to stop rivals and sellers from lowering prices, degrade quality for shoppers, overcharge sellers, stifle innovation, and prevent rivals from fairly competing against Amazon.
But India’s move is significant, since it is the world’s largest e-commerce market, and has effectively gone beyond the US and EU in its consumer protections.
India’s Central Consumer Protection Authority (CCPA) says the following in its notification:
Dark patterns involve using design and choice architecture to deceive, coerce, or influence consumers into making choices that are not in their best interest. Dark patterns encompass a wide range of manipulative practices such as drip pricing, disguised advertisement, bait and switch, false urgency etc.
Scroll down to read more about what each of these mean and why it’s good for India’s aam aadmi.
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Policy Watch: India bans "dark design patterns"
Dark design patterns on e-commerce platforms are ways of cheating users through a variety of misleading user interfaces, or simply by making it unnecessarily difficult for a user to do what they want, like canceling a subscription.
The CCPA says Such practices fall under the category of "unfair trade practices" as defined under the Consumer Protection Act, 2019. The CCPA specifically lists 13 dark patterns it says act against consumers’ best interests:
False urgency: Falsely stating or implying scarcity of a product to make consumer buy it because of FOMO.
Basket sneaking: Adding additional items like products, services or charity donations at the time of an online checkout, without a user’s consent, such that what the user pays is more than what they have chosen to buy.
Confirmshaming: Adding a phrase, image or other content to shame a consumer into purchasing something. The example given in the Indian regulations is a travel site that the phrase, “I will stay unsecured,” when a user does not add insurance to the purchase of an airline ticket.
Forced action: A user is preventing from buying something they want until they buy something they don’t or provide user information they don’t want to.
Subscription trap: Making it hard to cancel a subscription.
Interface interference: Misdirecting a user by obscuring relevant info and highlighting other info.
Bait-and-switch: For example, a website offers a product at a cheap price, but when the consumer is about to pay or buy, the product is “no longer available” (but another more expensive one is).
Drip pricing: Being sneaky with additional fees e.g. final price not disclosed until after purchase, or something is advertised as free without appropriate disclosure that you still have to pay for it later.
Disguised advertisement: Adverts masquerading as other types of content, such as user-generated content or news.
Nagging: Repeated annoying interactions to make you buy something.
Trick question: Deliberately using double negatives or confusing wording, to make the user do something they probably don’t want to.
SaaS billing: Taking recurring revenue from users surreptitiously.
Rogue malware: Using ransomware to trick users into believing they have a virus, to convince them to pay for a fake malware removal tool that actually installs malware.
Source: Central Consumer Protection Authority, Inc42, Jakob Neilsen Substack.
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