NICKELSBURG: Experts like Andrea Matwyshyn say when that design tricks a consumer into doing something they didn't intend to, it becomes a dark pattern. She's a law professor at Penn State University, and she served as an academic adviser to the FTC.
ANDREA MATWYSHYN: The question is when design crosses the line into a situation where a reasonable consumer does not have a fair shot of understanding what's going on.
NICKELSBURG: The FTC's job is to crack down on deceptive business practices. In the lawsuit, the FTC claims Amazon used dark patterns to trick millions of Prime members into renewing their subscriptions. When NPR reached out, Amazon didn't respond directly to that claim, instead pointing to a trial brief that says enrolling in Prime always requires affirmative consent.
The brief also says there's no clear law that prohibits dark patterns. Instead, the FTC is trying to take a broad law against fraud and make it apply to these practices through interpretation. Matwyshyn says the law is written to be intentionally broad so the FTC can regulate whatever the technology and business practices of the moment are.
MATWYSHYN: If you hand me a stack of papers with all of the relevant terms about our contract and you decide to rubber cement two pages together, were the pages all there? Well, yeah, technically they were all there, but you did something extra where I was unfairly disadvantaged.
- Date Published:9.23.2025
- Original Publication: NPR