Are you aware of "dark patterns" when you're shopping on the web?
According to Rethinking65, dark patterns aim to trick users, steal their data and get them to make choices they wouldn’t otherwise make. Some examples include advertisements which pose to be independent news stories, hiding fees late in the buying process, the collection of unneeded personal data with sales and being lured into a subscription after a free trial, to name a few.
As a matter of fact, 1,818 instances of dark patterns were found among 11,000 shopping websites analyzed by Princeton University researchers just a few years back.
The consequences of these choices can be costly to undo in time and money when the fraud that has been perpetrated on them becomes known. It would serve us all to be more informed about these practices and to be more cautious about giving out our personal information and wary of those “free” trials leading to subscriptions to seem impossible to cancel.
Check out THIS ARTICLE for some more education.
Keep yourself protected out there,
-LC