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Dark patterns are defined as practices or deceptive design patterns using user interface/user experience interactions on any platform, designed to mislead or trick users.
Photograph: Dado Ruvic/Reuters
The government is inviting hackers to craft solutions to protect consumers from the menace of dark patterns.
The Department of Consumer Affairs (DoCA) on Thursday launched the Dark Patterns Buster Hackathon 2023 in collaboration with IIT-BHU to help develop a design and prototype innovative app or software-based solutions that can identify if an e-commerce website is using one or more dark patterns.
Although there is no law governing the use of dark patterns, they contribute to unfair trade practices and can be classified as a violation of consumer rights, said Nidhi Khare, special secretary with DoCA.
Dark patterns are defined as practices or deceptive design patterns using user interface/user experience interactions on any platform, designed to mislead or trick users to do something they originally did not intend to do.
The hackathon will conclude on February 17, 2024, and involve four levels.
The winning software tool should make use of artificial intelligence to detect patterns accurately.
These plug-ins or extensions should be compatible across browsers and be user-friendly, said N S Rajput, professor at IIT-BHU.
Five winning teams will be awarded a cash prize of up to Rs 10 lakh.
India is the first country to take concrete steps on cracking down on these dark patterns, said Rohit Kumar Singh, consumer affairs secretary.
In September, DoCA sought public comments on draft guidelines for prevention and regulation of dark patterns.
As many as 10 such patterns had been identified in the guidelines.
These include false urgency, where a platform may falsely state or imply the sense of scarcity so as to mislead a user into making an immediate purchase.
Other such patterns include basket sneaking (inclusion of additional items such as products, services, payments to charity/donation at the time of checkout from a platform, without the consent of a user); and confirm shaming, which is done by using a phrase, video, audio or any other means to create a sense of fear or shame or guilt in the mind of the user, so as to nudge them to act in a certain way that results in the user purchasing a product or service.
Almost two months on, the secretary said industry stakeholders had reacted favourably to the guidelines.
They were also updated with three new dark patterns which the stakeholders drew attention to.
These included trick question , which refers to the deliberate use of confusing or vague language in order to misguide or misdirect a user; Saas billing , a process of generating and collecting payments from consumers on a recurring basis in a software as a service business model; and rogue malwares, a dark pattern using a ransomware or scareware to mislead/trick user into believing there is a virus on their computer with the aim of convincing them to pay for a fake malware removal tool that actually installs malware on their computer.
