Have you ever noticed that the consent button in a cookie banner is large and bright, while the refusal button is gray, small, and hidden in a submenu? Or that unsubscribing from a service is somehow more difficult than subscribing, even though technically it is the same action in reverse? This is not designers' negligence. It is a separate field of design that has a name, a classification, and now legal regulation.

What This Is

Dark patterns are techniques in interfaces that exploit the peculiarities of human thinking, pushing people toward decisions that they would not make if they had complete information and a calm choice. The key difference from ordinary marketing is that advertising tries to persuade, while a dark pattern tries to bypass the decision itself, using inattention, haste, or fatigue. The European Data Protection Board in its guidelines identified six categories of such techniques, including information overload, skipping important information, emotional influence, creating obstacles, inconsistency of the interface, and hiding essential details.

A Catalog of Techniques You Encounter Every Day

The best-known one is called the roach motel, and its essence is that entering is simple, while leaving is difficult. You can subscribe in two clicks, but to cancel, you have to search for the necessary item deep in the settings, go through several screens with questions about the reasons, and reject offers to stay. Confirmshaming consists of wording the refusal button in such a way that pressing it feels unpleasant. Instead of a simple “no,” the user sees something like “no, I don't want to save money” or “no, I'm not interested in good offers.” Preselected checkboxes work on people's tendency not to change what has already been set by default, and that is why consent to a mailing list is often enabled before you make your decision. Artificial urgency is created through countdowns, messages about the last places, and discount timers that start over every time the page is opened. The goal is to deprive the person of time to think. Hidden costs appear when the price looks attractive at the beginning, while commissions, service fees, and mandatory additional payments are added at the last step, when the person has already spent time completing the order and does not want to start over. Persistence consists of repeated requests that appear again and again until the person agrees simply to get rid of them. It is easy to recognize this technique by the absence of an option for a final refusal, since instead of “no,” “not now” is offered. Visual inequality of options works through contrast, when the action wanted by the company is designed as a bright button, while the alternative is presented in small gray text that is barely visible. Hiding the price through virtual currency is especially common in games, where a person buys conditional coins and then spends them, losing the sense of real money. Unwanted additions are offered during checkout, renewal, and even during subscription cancellation, relying on the fact that some people will agree inattentively.

Why This Works Even on Attentive People

The most interesting thing about dark patterns is that knowing about them does not make you invulnerable.

The reason is that they are designed not for a lack of intelligence, but for a lack of attention, and attention is an exhaustible resource. A person who makes hundreds of small decisions during the day uses automatic behaviors by the evening, and this is exactly the mode on which the calculation is based. The second reason is the asymmetry of effort. The company spends months testing which shade of a button and which wording produce a higher percentage of consent, while the user spends two seconds on this decision.

The third reason concerns context. These techniques work best precisely when you are in a hurry, standing in a queue, holding your phone with one hand, or really want to finish placing an order.

How This Became Illegal

For a long time, dark patterns were considered a question of ethics, that is, something improper but permitted. In recent years, the situation has changed. In the European Union, the Digital Services Act, which began to apply fully in February 2024, directly prohibited dark patterns on online platforms at the legislative level for the first time. Separately, the logic of the General Data Protection Regulation applies, according to which consent must be freely given and informed, and therefore consent obtained through a manipulative interface is not considered consent at all. In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission considers dark patterns an unfair or deceptive practice, and its rule on simple cancellation requires that refusing a subscription be as easy as signing up. In practice, this means a ban on a scheme under which you can subscribe online but can cancel only by phone during working hours. There have also been high-profile cases. The Commission sued Amazon over the difficulty of canceling a Prime subscription, and the court ordered the company to change its sign-up and cancellation interfaces. The Care.com platform in 2025 agreed to pay eight million dollars in a lawsuit in which the term “dark pattern” was used to describe a confusing cancellation page. The European Commission, meanwhile, plans to go further and prepare a separate Digital Fairness Act aimed at manipulative design and practices that create dependency.

What This Means for Ukrainians

Neither European nor American rules directly protect Ukrainian consumers, since they apply to companies within the respective jurisdictions and to their users.

There is still a certain indirect effect, because for large international services it is usually easier to change the interface globally than to maintain different versions for different countries. This is why the subscription cancellation button in many applications has become more noticeable for everyone, not only for Europeans.

But it is not worth relying on this, so the main protection remains recognizing the techniques.

How to Protect Yourself in Practice

The most effective principle is to slow down precisely where the interface is rushing you. A countdown, messages about the last places, and limited offers are not a reason to hurry, but a signal to stop. Read the buttons instead of simply clicking the most noticeable one, because the visual hierarchy here is intentionally not the same as the logical one. Check the final total at the last step of checkout, not on the product page, because it is precisely between these two screens that hidden costs are added. Uncheck preselected default checkboxes, that is, check them always, not only when something raises suspicion. Look for the refusal option not where the company has conveniently placed it, but in the account settings, because in the application the cancellation button is often hidden, while in the subscriptions section of your app store it is always there.

Set a calendar reminder immediately when starting trial periods, because the entire economics of free trials is built precisely on forgetfulness. Use a separate card with a limited balance for subscriptions, since this turns control from an action you have to remember into a mechanism that works by itself. I wrote about this in more detail in the material about subscriptions and automatic charges.

About the Other Side

It is also worth saying that not every inconvenient interface is manipulation. Sometimes the complexity arises because of poor design, an outdated system, or technical limitations, and attributing malicious intent to everything means seeing a conspiracy where there is ordinary negligence. A simple question about who benefits from a particular inconvenience helps distinguish one from the other. If the confusion systematically leads to the company receiving more consent, subscriptions, or data, then it is no longer an accident.


Sources: Guidelines of the European Data Protection Board 03/2022, EU Digital Services Act, U.S. Federal Trade Commission report Bringing Dark Patterns to Light, materials from The Regulatory Review