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The Documentary: Dark patterns

Dark patterns

15/02/2022 GMT

BBC World Service - The Documentary, Dark patterns

The complex web designs manipulating us to click, buy or subscribe

Trying to cancel some online accounts can be a maze of searches and false hopes, multiple clicks through a puzzle of seemingly unrelated destinations.

This is what has become known as a 'dark pattern'; complex web design that makes it hard for you to do something the website does not want you to do, and employs behavioural psychology to make you do things it does want you to do. It is just one of the techniques used to make us click, buy or subscribe.

Journalist and broadcaster Darryl Morris digs into the methods being used to grip your attention, and examines the persuasive power that is being harnessed. What impact is it having on your free will, and is there anything that can be done to resist it?

He hears from user experience expert Harry Brignall, who first blew the whistle on these practices, and Stockholm-based web designer Kat Zou, who exposes the intense pressure design teams are under to deliver company growth – and how some designers feel as trapped as the customers.

Dark patterns play a key role in getting users to share more data than they may otherwise choose to. Darryl meets Professor David Carrol, who famously took legal action against Cambridge Analytica. He describes the impact losing your data can have on your life, from your job, to where you live and how you are treated.

Finn Mystrad, who took one of the world’s biggest companies to task in his role on the Norwegian Consumer Council, explains how hard it is for governments to legislate against dark pattern web design.

And Darryl meets New Yorker Carla Sosenko, who tells him how online retail and dark patterns fed a shopping addiction that chipped away at her life.

(Photo: Abstract images on the theme of computers, Internet and high technology. Credit: Getty Images)

A Made in Manchester production for BBC World Service.

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