The department of consumer affairs on Thursday released draft guidelines for public consultation aimed at preventing and regulating dark patterns on online platforms, as they tend to deceive customers and manipulate their choices.
Simply put, dark patterns mean use of unfair practices by online platforms to mislead consumers, manipulating their decision-making through misleading advertisements, creating unnecessary fear among them to continue a subscription or product purchase, among other things.
The proposed guidelines have accordingly identified around 10 dark patterns, which are: false urgency, basket sneaking, confirm shaming, forced action, subscription trap, interface interference, bait and switch, drip pricing, disguised advertisement and nagging.
Once the guidelines are finalised and implemented, they will be applicable on all platforms offering goods or services in India, advertisers, and sellers. Stakeholders can send their comments on the guidelines till October 5.
False urgency means creating a sense of urgency or scarcity to mislead users into making an immediate purchase or take an immediate action. Similarly, basket sneaking means inclusion of additional paid items such as products, services, payments to charity/donation at the time of checkout from a platform, without user consent. Through confirm shaming practice, platforms use a phrase, video, audio or any other means to create a sense of fear or shame or ridicule or guilt in the mind of the user.
Similarly, practices like forcing consumer actions to buy unrelated products, indulging them into subscription trap by making it difficult to log out of subscriptions, unnecessary ask about payment details for giving free subscription, interfering in the user interface by hiding important information, misleading advertisements about products, are some of the dark patterns specified by the government.
The Central Consumer Protection Authority, under the department of consumer affairs, will keep on specifying other dark patterns from time to time.
In June, consumer affairs secretary Rohit Kumar Singh, had written to e-commerce firms and consumer associations, “it is essential that online platforms do not indulge in unfair trade practices by incorporating dark patterns in their online interface to manipulate consumer choice and violate ‘consumer rights’ as enshrined under Section 2(9) of the Act (Consumer Protection Act, 2019)”.
The draft guidelines have come after the government held consultations with the industry and e-commerce platforms including Advertising Standards Council of India (ASCI), law firms etc.
Post that it also created a task force consisting of representatives from industry associations, ASCI, e-commerce platforms including Google, Flipkart, Reliance Industries, Amazon, Go-MMT, Swiggy, Zomato, Ola, Tata CLiQ, Facebook, Meta, Ship Rocket, etc.
In a similar move to check the bias of platforms using artificial intelligence, the Telecommunication Engineering Centre (TEC) has also released procedures for accessing and rating artificial intelligence systems for fairness. “Artificial intelligence is increasingly being used in all domains including telecommunication and related information and communication technologies, for making decisions that may affect our day-to-day lives. Any unintended bias in the AI systems could have grave consequences,” TEC said.
Simply put, online platforms today provide goods and services, and match providers and customers. AI fairness score will check how much bias is there in the systems for preferring a particular seller or product by a particular seller to the users. The standards by TEC are not a regulatory requirement for platforms as yet.