Tech companies are actually now forbidden from exploiting behavioral patterns through design tricks. But according to consumer advice centers, people continue to be tricked.
Even a hundred days after the European Digital Services Act (DSA) came into force, large Internet companies from the USA and China are not complying with the new legal obligations, according to a study. Amazon, Booking.com, Google Shopping and YouTube are still using illegal design tricks (“dark patterns”) to steer consumers in a certain direction, as the Federal Association of Consumer Organizations (vzbv) announced today.
Color design of buttons or long click paths
The DSA came into force in August 2023. The law is primarily intended to ensure that hatred and hate speech online within the European Union are deleted more quickly. To do this, users must be able to report illegal content and providers must report suspicious criminal activity to the authorities. The big players with at least 45 million users in the EU are under special supervision.
These very large online platforms are also prohibited from exploiting human behavior or perception patterns through design tricks – for example, the color design of buttons or long click paths. According to consumer advocates, however, little has changed here.
“People feel manipulated, confused or tricked by design tricks on online platforms,” said vzbv board member Ramona Pop. “It is truly astonishing how persistently companies ignore the applicable laws or only half-heartedly implement them.”
Corporations do not yet make advertising criteria transparent
Consumer advocates also discovered serious deficiencies in the transparency of advertising criteria. Large online platforms are actually obliged to provide comprehensible and easily accessible information about the criteria according to which advertisements are displayed, explained the vzbv. This information should be able to be accessed directly by clicking on the advertisement. But: “None of the providers examined have so far fulfilled this obligation.”
The association examined the advertising on Instagram from the Meta Group, Snapchat, TikTok and the Twitter successor X. After all, all but Snapchat marked the ad content as advertising and identified the respective advertiser by name.
“Fine print” often not to be found
Consumer advocates are also not satisfied with the way the major Internet players present the “small print”. According to the DSA, providers must, for example, publish their contact information in an easy-to-find manner and make their general terms and conditions (GTC) transparent.
A contact option can now be found in the Apple App Store as well as on Facebook and TikTok. However, from the point of view of consumer advocates, this is “rather difficult to access”. The general terms and conditions are sometimes difficult to find and do not always contain all the required information – for example about internal complaint systems.
The consumer advocates examined the terms and conditions of the Booking.com and Google search websites as well as the TikTok and X/Twitter apps – some of which were over 50 A4 pages long.