Dark Patterns
We need regulations, where are our policymakers?
Dark Patterns is a scheme practiced almost by every company in the world, even companies like LinkedIn are very deep into it. Dark Patterns are tricks used in websites and apps that make you do things that you didn’t mean to, like buying or signing up for something.
Couple of months ago I wanted to watch a video that a friend sent me but required a premium account, I was told that getting the trial version will do the work, anyway to make the story short I got trapped into the stupid scheme and I got an annual premium subscription (paid about $270) which I could not escaped, even after all my claims to customer support.
Funny enough, couple of days ago I got an email about $599 charge for another subscription, in this case we are talking about Trading View, which everybody will probably agree that those guys are not as trustworthy as the nice people behind LinkedIn.
To make my story here short as well, those guys (thanks God) have a 14 days grace period for people who want to pull out due those kinds of tricks, I managed to recover my money.
Trading view is way better than LinkedIn regarding policies. We just need to follow the money, something as simple as this tells that the company has some principles, and way more values for example against LinkedIn.
We need regulations to put a big stop and therefore protect our customers. Why US, European Union or anyone else don’t make policies like the ones already available on Trading View but to everybody else? come on, how hard is to protect people?
You will get surprised — if you check carefully your credit card statements — on how many subscriptions you are enroll to.
Doesn’t matter if we are talking about small or big subscription, we are talking about millions of people falling into this trap, it’s a multibillion-dollar business and we need regulators, we need to stop the manipulation.
If you want to read more, here is a great article from NYTimes:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/30/opinion/dark-pattern-internet-ecommerce-regulation.html
What do you think?
