“Dark patterns” have increasingly been the focus of legislative and regulatory scrutiny. Yet the phrase is never used in business. No business designs a website, mobile app, or business process with ...

Experts are warning consumers about shady online business practices that the Federal Trade Commission and tech insiders refer to as “dark patterns.” “By their very nature, dark patterns are subtle, ...

On September 15, 2022, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) released a report on dark patterns (the, “Report”) that identifies the types of misleading and manipulative interface practices that the ...

You can’t find an easy way to cancel an unwanted subscription, so you let it continue for another month — telling yourself you’ll try again later. You feel rushed into an online purchase you regret, ...

Dark patterns are special tricks used in the interface of applications and websites that make you do things that you don’t really want to. For example, when you land on a website and have to sign up ...

If you’ve ever found yourself struggling to cancel an online subscription, or to deactivate an account on a website, you may have fallen prey to ‘dark patterns’. The Advertising Standards Authority ...

Cookie banners with a "no reject" option. Free trial subscriptions that are absurdly difficult to cancel. Hidden refund options. Misleading email access requests. The list of dark patterns — deceptive ...

When OpenAI rolled out its ChatGPT-4o update in mid-April 2025, users and the AI community were stunned—not by any groundbreaking feature or capability, but by something deeply unsettling: the updated ...

These are just a few examples of “dark patterns” — intentionally deceptive designs that companies use to steer people into making choices that aren’t in the consumers’ best interest. Dark patterns may ...