What are dark patterns? A plain-language field guide

You meant to cancel. You ended up subscribed for another year. You meant to reject the cookies. You ended up accepting all 847 "partners". You meant to buy one thing. There were three things in the basket at checkout.

You are not careless. The interface was built that way.

The definition

A dark pattern is an interface deliberately designed to get you to do something you didn't mean to do — spend more, share more, or stay subscribed longer than you intended.

UX designer Harry Brignull coined the term in 2010, naming an initial set of twelve specific interface tricks. The word stuck because it named something everyone had experienced but nobody had a word for. It has since been written into European law through the Digital Services Act and into US Federal Trade Commission enforcement guidance. Brignull himself now prefers "deceptive patterns", which is clearer about what is going on.

The key word is deliberately. A confusing checkout built by a rushed team is bad design. A checkout where the "no thanks" link is grey, small, and below the fold is a decision somebody made, tested, and kept because it worked.

Why they work on you, specifically

It is tempting to think this only happens to people who don't read carefully. That is not what the research shows.

Nobody reads an interface the way they read a book. We skim for the thing we came to do, we follow the brightest button, and we decide in under a second. Interfaces are designed around those habits. A dark pattern doesn't defeat your intelligence; it exploits the gap between how fast you decide and how fast you could reason if you stopped to.

And stopping to reason isn't enough either. A 2021 study surveyed 406 people and found they were generally aware that manipulative designs influence their behaviour online — but being aware did not equip them to resist it. Participants often recognised that a design was manipulative while remaining unsure what harm it would actually cause them. Knowing about the trap and being able to step around it turn out to be two different skills.

That finding is the reason this tool exists. If awareness were sufficient, an article would be enough. It isn't. Help has to arrive at the moment of the decision.

The common types

Confirmshaming

The opt-out is worded to make you feel bad. "No thanks, I don't want to save money." "I prefer paying full price." The decline option works perfectly well — it just costs you a small humiliation to use it.

Roach motel

Easy to get in, hard to get out. Signing up takes one click and no confirmation. Cancelling takes four screens, a retention offer, a phone call during office hours, and an email you have to reply to. The asymmetry is the tell: if creating an account is instant, deleting it can be instant too.

Fake urgency

"Only 2 left!" "Offer ends in 09:58." Sometimes true, often not. The giveaway is a countdown that resets when you reload the page, or a scarcity notice that has said "2 left" for three weeks. Real scarcity is a fact about inventory. Fake urgency is a fact about the page.

Sneaking

Something gets added that you didn't ask for. An extra item in the basket, insurance pre-selected on a flight, a "donation" rounded up by default. Nothing is hidden exactly — it's simply placed where you have no reason to look.

Obstruction

The path you want is made deliberately longer. The unsubscribe link at the bottom of an email in 6pt grey. The privacy settings spread across nine separate pages. The reject button one layer deeper than the accept button, which is the specific version that shows up in cookie banners.

Trick wording

The sentence is constructed so the obvious reading is the wrong one. "Uncheck this box if you do not wish to not receive marketing emails." Read it twice. Now read it the way you would if you were in a hurry.

How common is this, really?

Common enough that "some apps do this" understates it badly.

Researchers analysed 240 popular mobile apps in 2020 and found that 95% contained at least one dark pattern. The average app used at least seven different types. Not one trick per app — seven, layered, in the apps most people have on their phones right now.

Regulators noticed. The FTC's September 2022 staff report, "Bringing Dark Patterns to Light", documented four tactics it sees most often: disguising ads as ordinary content, making subscriptions hard to cancel, burying key terms and junk fees, and tricking people into handing over data. The report drew on cases across e-commerce, cookie consent banners, children's apps and subscription sales.

Enforcement is real but slow, and it works at the level of companies rather than the level of your Tuesday evening.

How to spot them

A few habits catch most of it:

• Compare the two buttons. If yes and no are not the same size, colour, and weight, somebody has a preference about your answer.
• Look for the asymmetry. Count the clicks to opt in, then the clicks to opt out. That ratio is the whole story.
• Reload the page. A countdown that starts over was never counting anything.
• Read the sentence with the checkbox twice. Especially if it contains "not".
• Check the basket, not the product page. Sneaking happens between the two.

None of this is difficult. It is just effortful, every time, on every site, forever — which is precisely why almost nobody sustains it.

Where we come in

Can I Throw This? is being built to do the noticing for you. When a page uses a pattern from this guide, the extension names it in plain language, right where it happens — not in a report you read afterwards, but at the moment you were about to click.

It runs entirely on your device. Recognising a countdown timer doesn't require anyone to know what you were shopping for.