Dark Patterns

Pay for free trials and subscriptions with a virtual or single-merchant card number that you can cap, pause, or close yourself, so that a renewal you did not want fails at the payment stage instead of depending on the merchant's cancellation process.

Before entering payment details, spend one minute finding out how you would leave: search the service's name with "cancel", read the cancellation terms, and treat a hard or hidden exit as a price you are being asked to pay.

On any checkout, sign-up, or consent screen, read each checkbox and toggle before you continue, noting whether it is already ticked and whether ticking means yes or no, because defaults and confusing wording are how extras, marketing consent, and data sharing are obtained from people who never chose them.

When an interface tricks you (a hidden charge, a fake countdown, a cancellation maze, consent you never gave), document it and report it to the regulator and the platform, because enforcement against deceptive design is driven by complaint data and one documented report protects people who would never have spotted the trick.

Before a campaign, advertisement, fundraising appeal, or pitch goes out, test it against the five TARES duties: Truthfulness of the message, Authenticity of the persuader, Respect for the audience, Equity of the appeal, and Social responsibility for the common good.

Ask whether you would be comfortable seeing the tactic, including how it works and why you chose it, described accurately on the front page of a newspaper read by your audience; if the tactic only works when the audience does not know about it, treat that as a finding.

List every persuasive element in a campaign, tag each one as neutral craft, dual-use, or manipulative by design, and for each dual-use element write down where the line is and which side of it you are on.

Before launch, give people who did not build the campaign the explicit job of attacking it as a skeptical journalist, a regulator, a competitor, a harmed customer, and a bad actor would, and fix what they find while it is still cheap to fix.

Before an A/B test or pilot starts, write down the primary metric, the harm metrics that must not get worse, the sample size or stopping rule, and the planned analysis, so that the result can tell you something you did not already want to hear.