Dark Patterns – use on Online Platforms to mislead consumers – Salutary guidelines of protection
It is common experience that the on-line platforms mislead the consumers by using dark patterns tactics and prevent them from making choice of their product.
Now the Central Consumer Protection Authority has issued the guidelines vide Notification dated 30.11.2023, under Section 18 of the Consumer Protection Act, 2019.
The Guidelines for Prevention and Regulation of Dark Patterns, 2023, apply to all platforms offering goods or services, advertisers, sellers and prohibit them against engaging the consumers in dark patterns.
“Dark Pattern” is defined to mean “any deceptive design or pattern or practice using interface or user interactions on any platform” to mislead or trick the users to do some thing which they originally did not want to do.
In other words, dark patterns impair the consumer autonomy, decision or choice making.
In short, it amounts to misleading advertisement or unfair trade practice violating the rights of the consumers.
The Guidelines have specified dark patterns such as – basket sneaking, forced action, subscription trap, interface interference, bai and switch, drip pricing, disguise advertisement, nagging, trick question, Saas billing and rogue malwares.
Saas Billing is very important and it prevents generating and collecting payments from consumers on a recurring basis in a software as a service (SaaS) business model by exploiting positive acquisition loops in recurring subscriptions to get money from users as surreptitiously as possible.
