User experience designers mostly use their knowledge of cognitive psychology and usability to design the best experience for you as possible. However, they sometimes also apply their understanding of these psychological biases to create user experiences that herd and misdirect you to take a path or decision you didn’t mean to take. This is also known as a dark pattern. Instead of designing with your best interests at heart, they design for their business’ goals, whether that is more sales, more data, or more subscribed users.

These dark patterns are ethically problematic since they nudge you towards particular choices and actions that may be against your own interest. They take your agency away without you knowing. Although most commonly seen in the user experience of e-commerce sites, they have become more prevalent particularly in privacy consent notices and pop-ups since the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has been in place since May of this year.

Using dark patterns to trick you into sharing more information about yourself than you intended to have been so common it even has a name: ‘Privacy Zuckering’ named after Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg.

The next time you’re browsing the web, here are a few dark patterns you should look out for.