Concept
Dark Patterns (Online Choice Architecture Exploitation)
online-behavior ethics choice-architecture
Elisabeth Costa describes "dark patterns" as choice-architecture techniques deployed online specifically to exploit consumer behavior against consumers' own interests — distinct from merely unthoughtful design, which she treats as a separate, less deliberate category. Because online platforms are fully curated and deliberately designed environments (unlike, say, a physical supermarket, which many different actors influence), businesses running them have far more granular control over exactly what a user sees and when than any offline choice architect ever could.
Examples she cites: greying out privacy-preserving options as if they can't be clicked when they can; adding friction specifically to discourage opting out of things like cookies; and setting an anchor for a self-imposed limit far higher than any reasonable person would choose — UK online gambling sites are required to let users set a daily deposit limit, but the highest selectable figure on most sites is £100,000, more than three times the average UK household's annual income, which pulls the average selected limit upward (see Online Gambling Deposit-Limit Anchor Case). Even something as basic as the near-universal, rarely-read length of online terms and conditions (PayPal's runs to 36,000 words — longer than Hamlet) functions as a dark pattern by making genuinely informed consent close to impossible by design.
The same tools can run the other way. BIT's own research found that simple, honest behavioral redesign of consent disclosures — telling users upfront how long a privacy notice will take to read, or that this is their last chance to review it before signing up — measurably increases genuine engagement rather than exploiting inattention (see BIT Terms-and-Conditions Redesign Study). TikTok's partnership with Irrational Labs to flag and downrank likely COVID disinformation reduced its spread without banning anything outright (see TikTok Disinformation Flagging Experiment), and a UK government-backed test of privacy-setting interfaces found giving users an active, explained choice (rather than a buried default) measurably improved how informed and in-control people felt about their own data (see Android Privacy-Settings Slider Rct).
Discussed in
- Episode 66 — 66- The dark nudges behind digital manipulation