Chapter 22: Harm to individuals
Financial loss
There are a number of ways a user can suffer financially from deceptive patterns. They might be tricked into making a purchase they didn’t intend (sneaking), or they might struggle to cancel a subscription and pay for extra periods without wanting to (hard to cancel). They may also be charged extra fees at the last minute that they did not expect (hidden costs). In a survey of over 2,000 British adults, UK advocacy group Citizens Advice found that respondents lost £50–100 a year on unwanted subscriptions they should not have been charged for.1
Another way to look at the scale of financial loss is to look at legal case outcomes, since the size of a fine or settlement typically corresponds with the scale of the financial harm to consumers. At the time of writing, the deceptive.design website lists roughly fifty cases where the outcome involves fines or settlements, some of which run into tens of millions of dollars.2
Time loss
Everyone has a finite amount of time alive, and deceptive patterns often serve to take it away unfairly. This can happen by making actions difficult (hard to cancel, for instance), by purposefully depleting user’s time in order to wear them down (resource depletion), or by making users jump through hoops before they can rectify the outcomes of deceptive patterns, like claiming a refund.
The FTC takes time loss seriously. In a 2022 complaint against credit services company Credit Karma, the FTC argued that Credit Karma’s false claims meant ‘numerous consumers wasted significant time applying for credit card offers’. They reached a settlement including $3 million in consumer redress, a commitment to stop deceiving consumers, and to preserve design and research records for future investigations.
Unintended contracts
If a user purportedly enters a legal agreement without being aware that it exists (sneaking), then they may be surprised when the business tries to tie them into it.3 For example, a mandatory arbitration clause might take away the user’s ability to take the business to court.
Privacy loss
People often don’t know their private data is being used without their permission because they can’t see it happening. This means that people are often reliant on advocacy groups and other informed parties to fight on their behalf.4 In 2022, SERNAC carried out a study on over 70,000 users, finding that deceptive patterns can cause substantial privacy loss. By simply changing the default option (opted in to cookies versus opted out), this caused 94 percentage points more users to allow privacy loss to occur.5
Psychological harms
Deceptive patterns often employ psychological techniques to make users emotionally uncomfortable (confirmshaming and pressure selling). In 2019, UK-based researcher Simon Shaw carried out a survey of 2,102 British participants, showing them pages from hotel booking sites that contained pressure selling techniques (scarcity and social proof), and found that 34% of respondents expressed a negative emotion such as contempt or disgust.6 In 2002, the Australian Consumer Policy Research Center (CPRC) surveyed 2,000 people and found that 40% of them felt annoyed and 28% felt manipulated when a website or app used a deceptive pattern. Similarly, a 2022 European Commission study found that some deceptive patterns led to increases in heart rate and erratic mouse clicks, potentially indicating anxiety.7
Loss of freedom to think
Human rights lawyer Susie Alegre explains this issue in her book Freedom to Think, inspired by the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2017, which highlighted the use of political behavioural microtargeting on social media to manipulate people.8 Deceptive patterns play a role in this: enabling social media businesses to extract fake consent from users regarding the use of their personal data; and enabling them to use principles of addiction to make their products so compelling that they can dominate users’ consumption of news and understanding of the world at large. Alegre emphasises that this goes beyond privacy and data protection, but rather to the heart of ideological freedom. She explains:9
‘The rights to freedom of thought, conscience, religion and belief and freedom of opinion are absolute rights protected in international law. Without freedom of thought or opinion, we have no humanity, and we have no democracy. Making these rights real requires three things: (i) the ability to keep your thoughts private; (ii) freedom from manipulation of your thoughts; (iii) that no one can be penalised for their thoughts alone.’
Given that deceptive patterns directly involve the manipulation of thought, it is clear that they are a central issue in the battle for the human right of freedom of thought, harming not just individuals but society as a whole.10