Dark patterns stay for consumers, gig workers post self-audit, say researchers

While the Central Consumer Protection Authority has obtained declarations from most major e-commerce platforms that they have eliminated “dark patterns” from their services, consumer groups and researchers say that these still exist on many digital platforms. Dark patterns are deceptive practices used to trick consumers into paying more. A recent report by the Centre for Responsible AI (CeRAI) at IIT Madras shows that the gamut includes at least one more effect: misleading gig workers into getting paid less.

The report, published in September, lists a few of the dark patterns gig workers are faced with: false urgency, where workers are shown a countdown timer to indicate that a job will disappear if they don’t act fast enough to accept it; wage concealment, where workers are not shown the potential earnings from a job until they accept it, with potential penalties for cancelling an accepted job; “excessive monitoring” of workers, including real-time access to their device’s microphone; and “unfair deactivations,” where no clear reason is given to workers for being deactivated.

In an interview on Friday, Krishnan Narayanan and Omir Kumar, who prepared the report for CeRAI, told The Hindu that while there are transparency gaps in how these apps function — “algorithmic opacity,” as Mr. Narayan puts it — the above individual practices add to the problem. “There is a lot of awareness on the consumer side” for dark patterns, Mr. Kumar said, but not enough for those impacting workers.

“Sometimes, that’s just the nature of two-sided platforms like this,” Mr. Narayanan said, referring to aggregators like delivery services connecting users and gig workers. However, the researchers said, this would have to be a part of firms’ self-audit on dark patterns. Mr. Kumar said he wasn’t convinced that the government needed to specify prescriptive guidelines to that end though: “You need some sort of gamification on these platforms, and strict guidelines may disrupt how they function,” he said.

Consumer side

Sachin Taparia, founder of the online polling startup LocalCircles, said his firm had conducted dark pattern audits of hundreds of platforms on the consumer side, and that several patterns persisted, even among firms that have certified to the CCPA that they have got rid of them. For instance, he said, instead of showing a struck-out list price with a discounted sale price, one platform was showing a struck out discount price in a small font size, and showed a higher sale price, giving the false impression of a discount.

“The only thing some platforms have fixed is drip pricing and basket sneaking,” Mr. Taparia said, referring to a practice of adding more fees or products when a user is finalising a purchase. Mr. Taparia, whose audit is dated for late September, after the firms’ audits were submitted to the CCPA, showed other examples, such as large appliances, where installation is typically offered free, were displayed with a misleadingly lower price, with an installation cost added at the checkout stage.

Mr. Taparia also pointed out an example of surveillance-based advertising, where firms used logged-in users’ WhatsApp details to nudge them on product pages they had visited online but not purchased. In another example (of “drip pricing”), Mr. Taparia showed a platform adding a “Payment Handling Fee” at the checkout stage, on top of the delivery fee and platform fee, the latter in itself arguably an example of drip pricing.