Online businesses often involve quite a bit of subterfuge known as Dark Patterns. Surprisingly, this isn't the name of Metal Band rather it’s a tactic designed to influence you somehow, usually into buying a product or service you might not really want, sign up for marketing emails, or simply stop you from doing something the business may not want you to do.
Dark Patterns aren’t one size fits all, just like a Stephen King monster a Dark Pattern can take many forms. One classic example is how hard it often is to find the phone number to talk to a real human being when you need customer service. A related tactic is how hard some services make it to close your account. You have probably seen how companies will bury the unsubscribe link on any email at the bottom in a tiny font. This is not a big deal compared to trying to straight-up canceling a membership.
Typically bringing up a settings menu and clicking “Close my account” isn’t good enough, sites will either entice you to stay with a massive in-your-face offer to prevent you from canceling the subscription with the actual cancel link presented in a much smaller size. Or they will make it insanely hard to find the actual “Delete my account” button. Amazon is notorious for this and many others such as Facebook. This is a good example of what designers call a Roach Motel, easy to sign up for an account and get in but hard to leave.
There are other instances to watch out for like how these sites will use UI elements to nudge the users in a certain direction. This can also be done in a less subtle way called Confirmshaming. When you get a popup promising discounts and exclusive offers, if you’re not interested in getting email spam you can’t just click on a close button instead you have to click on a small link with some condescending nonsense like “No thanks, I’d rather pay full price”.
Possibly the worst form of Dark Pattern is the one that actively requires you to click an extra button to opt-out of something. This can be anything from how tedious some sites make it to reject unnecessary cookies or have a prefilled checkbox to install some unwanted antivirus program or toolbar when installing some software.
These aren’t the only kind of Dark Patterns floating around out there so while it’s a pain, be sure to take a few extra seconds to read before you click.