Dark Patterns: How Digital Platforms Manipulate Consumer Choice

Amazon just paid $2.5 billion for making “Cancel” too hard to find. Here’s how the same tricks work on you every day and why they’re now illegal in India.

Introduction

Picture this actually, this happened to me. I signed up for a “7-day free trial” of a meditation app, fully intending to cancel before it charged me. I set a reminder, opened the app on day six, and went looking for the cancel button. Fifteen minutes, four confusing menus, and one “Are you sure you want to lose your progress?” pop-up later, I gave up. Three days after that, the money disappeared from my account anyway.

The FTC has a term for the frustrating experience of falling victim to deceptive UI designs (known as “dark patterns”) that trick you into spending too much on products and services, surrendering your personal information, and continuing to pay for services/features that you never intended to use, among other things. In September of 2025, the FTC reached an agreement with Amazon in which they were required to pay $2.5 billion as a result of their use of dark patterns in providing Prime memberships. As I see it, dark patterns are more than just design anomalies; they and other similar types of manipulative trade practices have been illegal in India since November 2023.

The Amazon Case: How We Got Here

In June 2023, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) started a lawsuit against Amazon, claiming the company used deceptive attorney methods with its Prime subscription services to mislead customers. According to the FTC, Amazon made it difficult for customers to cancel their Prime membership by design. Amazon used an internal term, called “Iliad Flow”, to describe the difficulties customers faced when attempting to cancel their Prime membership. A name, you might say, that tells you everything about how Amazon viewed its own users’ experience.^[1] According to the FTC complaint, cancelling Prime required navigating a four-page, six-click, fifteen-option process, with discount offers and benefit reminders inserted at every step to make users give up. Signing up, by contrast, took one or two clicks. Amazon and the Department of Justice negotiated a deal before trial began on 22 September 2025 (First Day of Trial), and the court entered an order on 25 September 2025 assessing civil penalties totaling $1 billion plus $1.5 billion worth of refunds paid to approximately thirty-five million affected individuals, thereby creating one of the largest consumer protection settlements ever reached in United States history.^[2]

What Indian Law Actually Says: The CCPA Guidelines, 2023

India’s Central Consumer Protection Authority has published the Guidance Document on Prevention and Regulation of Dark Patterns, which is being implemented on 30th November 2023, pursuant to Section 18 of The Consumer Protection Act, 2019 (the Act), by providing guidance to organisations that provide goods or services in India. The Guidance Document applies to any organisation and all online platforms providing goods or services to consumers located in India, and it prohibits 13 specifically named Dark Patterns. Violations of these guidelines will be treated as either an Unfair Trade Practice or a Misleading Advertisement under the Act, thus allowing consumers to seek remedies via the Consumer Complaint Mechanism.^[3][4]

Here are six of the most commonly encountered patterns from that official list:

• False urgency – countdown timers that reset when you refresh, or “Only 2 left!” banners that remain unchanged for weeks. Manufactured deadlines designed to stop you from thinking twice before buying.

• Basket sneaking – insurance, donations, or paid add-ons silently added to your cart without clear consent, inflating your total before you reach checkout.

• Subscription trap – one-click sign-up, labyrinthine cancellation. You guessed it this is precisely what Amazon was fined $2.5 billion for. You sign up in seconds; leaving requires a maze.

• Drip pricing – the advertised price excludes mandatory fees that appear only at the final checkout step. A “₹300” food order quietly becomes “₹450” by the time you confirm.

• Confirm shaming –guilt-tripping language on the decline button, “No, I don’t want to save money” designed to shame you out of opting out.

• Disguised advertisements – paid promotions and sponsored listings styled to look like organic search results or independent recommendations, making it impossible to tell paid from genuine.

Now, if you ask me, the most significant aspect of these guidelines is their extraterritorial reach. They cover every platform offering goods or services in India, regardless of where it is headquartered. In June 2025, the CCPA issued a formal advisory directing major e-commerce platforms to self-audit and remove dark patterns within three months, and has already begun issuing notices to platforms found in violation. Enforcement is no longer theoretical.^[5]

What This Means For You

If you have ever faced difficulties in cancelling a subscription, seen additional fees added during check-out or felt unfairly pressured by a fake countdown on an Indian app that you used, then you may have been the subject of an unfair business practice (UBP), as outlined in the Consumer Protection Act, 2019. The National Consumer Helpline (consumerhelpline.gov.in) (1 915) is available to assist you in filing a complaint, as is your bank and/or credit card company to help reverse any fraudulent charges while they research the issue further. Founders, product managers and anyone creating a digital product for the Indian consumer are subject to compliance requirements, and should not assume that this is a grey area.^[6]

The Bottom Line

My meditation app refund eventually came through one call to my card issuer, one screenshot of the cancellation maze, ten minutes total. The sign-up had taken thirty seconds. That gap between thirty seconds and ten minutes is the entire business model of a dark pattern.

Amazon’s $2.5 billion settlement is a simple lesson: designing against your users is no longer just an ethics problem it is a legal one. India’s CCPA Guidelines are our version of that reckoning. The next time you find a cancel button suspiciously hard to locate, you are not being paranoid. You may be looking at a violation of consumer protection law. Now you know and knowing is already most of the defence.

The question that keeps coming to mind for me is whether or not the CCPA Guidelines prohibit 13 types of dark patterns and do not provide any separate penalty for breaking these guidelines. Instead, those who complain about violating the CCPA Guidelines must use the general Consumer Protection Act process. Are the CCPA Guidelines actual laws that carry meaningful penalties, or simply purposely written recommendations that are going to need to be resolved through case law? I’m really interested in hearing your opinion on this.

References

Primary Sources

• Central Consumer Protection Authority, Guidelines for Prevention and Regulation of Dark Patterns, 2023 (Nov. 30, 2023).

• FTC v. Amazon.com, Inc., No. 2:23-cv-00932-JHC (W.D. Wash. Sept. 25, 2025)

(settlement order).

• Press Release, Fed. Trade Comm’n, FTC Secures $2.5 Billion Settlement Against Amazon (Sept. 25, 2025), https://www.ftc.gov/news–events/news/press–releases.

• Trade Comm’n, Bureau of Consumer Prot., Bringing Dark Patterns to Light (Sept. 2022), https://www.ftc.gov/reports/bringing–dark–patterns–light.

Secondary Sources

• IAPP, India’s CCPA Guidelines on Dark Patterns: Welcome Signal, but Law Is Still Soft, iapp.org (Sept. 2025), https://iapp.org/news/a/india–s–ccpa–guidelines–on–dark–patternswelcome–signal–but–law–is–still–soft.

• FTC’s Landmark $2.5 Billion Amazon Settlement Highlights Ongoing Focus on Dark Patterns, Nat’l L. Rev. (Sept. 30, 2025), https://www.natlawreview.com.

• Norwegian Consumer Council (Forbrukerrådet), Deceived by Design (June 27, 2018).

• Colin M. Gray et al., The Dark (Patterns) Side of UX Design, in Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 534 (ACM 2018).

[1] Complaint, FTC v. Amazon.com, Inc., No. 2:23-cv-00932-JHC (W.D. Wash. June 21, 2023).

[2] Settlement Order, FTC v. Amazon.com, Inc., No. 2:23-cv-00932-JHC (W.D. Wash. Sept. 25, 2025).

[3] Central Consumer Protection Authority, Guidelines for Prevention and Regulation of Dark Patterns, 2023, issued under Consumer Protection Act, 2019, § 18 (notified Nov. 30, 2023).

[4] Consumer Protection Act, 2019, §§ 2(47), 21 (India).

[5] CCPA Advisory on Dark Patterns (June 2025) (on file with author); see also IAPP, India’s CCPA Guidelines on Dark Patterns: Welcome Signal, but Law Is Still Soft, iapp.org (Sept. 2025), https://iapp.org/news/a/india–s–ccpaguidelines–on–dark–patterns–welcome–signal–but–law–is–still–soft. 

[6] Consumer Protection Act, 2019, § 18 (India); National Consumer Helpline, consumerhelpline.gov.in (last visited June 2026).