Malwarebytes: 40% of online shops tricking users with “dark patterns”

[iamjanco]

Quote

The European Commission has been looking at retail websites to see if they're misleading consumers with "dark patterns". Spoiler: Yes, they are.

 

The Commission, along with the national consumer protection authorities of 23 EU member states, plus Norway and Iceland, have released the results of their screening of online shops. In a sweep of 399 sites the investigation discovered that 148 of them contained at least one of the three dark patterns they were checked for.

 

Dark patterns

Dark patterns, also known as deceptive design patterns, occur when a user interface has been carefully crafted to nudge or trick users into doing things they didn’t set out to do...

 

 

Source.

[Andrew]

I'm surprised it's taken this long for it to be pointed out.

[Kaz]

Yeah by now it's so common I'm not even mad.  Both Amazon and Newegg do this. 

[Alex]

Only 40%? That's less than I thought.

[J7SC_Orion]

...time for the US to follow suit...Register.com and NetworkSolutions (both web.com) are mostly dark patterns when simply trying to renew some URLs (we have about 40 of those, so its 40x the same annoying dark patterns...). Other domain registrars are also getting there... 

[bonami2]

Equifax / Transunion are the best they have two main page. One to buy a sub. And one to login.

 

When you call you can't even understand what they are saying either with the crappy phone line quality.

[iamjanco]

A bit belated, but still possibly somewhat intriguing given the topic at hand 

 

 

[Sir Beregond]

1 hour ago, iamjanco said:

A bit belated, but still possibly somewhat intriguing given the topic at hand 

 

 

Fun fact, we went and saw a showing of They Live at a movie theater back in October. Was fun.