Daybreak - When dark patterns become default

Episode Date: August 11, 2025

The Indian government is losing patience with consumer-tech platforms using dark patterns or manipulative design tricks.In late May 2024, Consumer Affairs Minister, Pralhad Joshi, gathered the country’s biggest internet companies, Amazon, Google, Zomato, Ola Electric, etc to give them an ultimatum: clean up your user interfaces by September 5 or face the consequences.From hidden fees on Amazon to guilt-inducing pop-ups on Indigo, these tactics push users into spending more money, sharing more data, or giving up more control, often without realising it. And they’re deeply baked into how these companies grow, making them hard to remove without hurting the bottom line.Tune in.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Hi, this is Rohan Dharma Kumar. If you've heard any of the Ken's podcasts, you've probably heard me, my interruptions, my analogies, and my contrarian takes on most topics. And you might rightly be wondering why am I interrupting this episode too. It's for a special announcement. For the last few months, I and Sita Raman Ganeshan, my colleague and the Ken's deputy editor, have been working on an ambitious new podcast. It's called Intermission.

We want to tell the Sita Ramancahans, my colleague and the same. secret sauce stories of India's greatest companies. Stories of how they were born, how they fought to survive, how they build their organizations and culture, how they managed to innovate and thrive over decades, and most importantly, how they're poised today. To do that, Sita and I have been reading books, poring over reports, going through financial statements, digging up archives, and talking to dozens of people. And if that wasn't enough, we also decided to throw in video into.

to the mix. Yes, you heard that right. Intermission has also had to find its footing in the world of multi-camera shoots in professional studios, laborious editing, and extensive post-production. Sita and I are still reeling from the intensity of our first studio recording. Intermission launches on March 23rd. To get an alert, as soon as we release our first episode, please follow Intermission on Spotify and Apple Podcast. or subscribe to the Ken's YouTube channel. You can find all of the links at the ken.com slash I am. With that, back to your episode.

The Indian government has had enough of consumer tech platforms tricking users. So in May this year, Consumer Affairs Minister Prelajoshi gathered the country's top internet companies like Make My Trip, Zomato, Olay Electric, Google and Amazon into a room and he gave them an ultimatum. Conduct self-audits to identify and remove dark patterns or face the music. And the deadline was set for September 5th. Now, dark patterns, in case you're wondering,

are designed tactics that trick users into taking actions that benefit the business more than the user. You can think of them as interface nudges that nudge you a bit too hard. And these tactics run the deepest on the biggest platform. Take Amazon India's friendly looking at this price button. Someone familiar with product flows on large platforms explained it to our contributing writer Farine Yusuf. They said that clicking on it leads to monthly charges, hidden costs and fine print. Another example of these dark patterns is how Amazon made customer service harder to reach.

They removed the chat with us option and replaced it with a labyrinth of help pages. Now, this is not just Amazon. Book My Show was caught quietly pre-selecting a one-rupee donation at checkout. Let me give you another example. In 2024, Indigo Airline was using guilt-inducing pop-ups like, no, I will take a risk to push in-flight insurance and travel assistance. Now, none of this is obviously for your or my benefit. For years, ed tech, fintech and quick commerce companies have struck a fortune bargain.

trading rapid scale for their integrity. And the trade boils down to persuading users to give up more and more and more, more money, more data and more control. And all of that at the cost of consumer trust. The regulator, the central consumer protection authority, has in fact already issued 11 notices under the 2023 guidelines of the Consumer Protection Act. And the September deadline is only the latest reckoning. Because these aren't one.

one of growth hacks. They are embedded levers that are core to how companies acquire, convert and retain. And removing them is not a UI tweak. It is an existential threat to their bottom line. Welcome to Daybreak, a business podcast from the Ken. I'm your host Nick Das Sharma and I don't chase the new cycle. Instead, every day of the week, my colleague, Rahal Philipos and I will come to you with one business story that is worth understanding and worth your time. Today is Monday, the 11th of August. Consumer tech in India is not built for the masses. It is built for the top 10% and this is according to a recent research report. And even within that group, it is a bare-knuckle brawl. Dozens of new companies crowd into the same high-intent

user base every year chasing a wallet that isn't nearly growing as fast. Meanwhile, funding has slowed to a trickle, dropping by almost half in FY2. 2025 from the year before. Achuta Sharma, the founder of User Research India, told again that in a crowded market like this, consumers are not loyal to any brand. They look for the best offers instead. And companies in turn try to lure them with newer and more deceptive product designs. The battle cry is acquire, convert and retain.

And this is where dark patterns flourish. Sharma told us that they are a shortcut to improve metrics, rapidly. And there are some all too common tricks. Combo offers and extreme discounts like you've seen it. Three for $999 or $999 slash to $199. One assistant

brand manager at a digital first brand told the Ken that the first rule is never sell the product at the original launch price. There should always be some discount to sway the customer. It is mind play. This works especially well for tier two and tier three

consumers who think price first and product later. Quick commerce platform Zepto has been facing the heat for misleading features. Rochuk, who is a regular user, told again that prices on the app do not add up until the very end. Hidden handling charges and arbitrary roundoff costs appear at the payment. Even discounts under Zepto's Super Saver Plan are often offset by last-minute price additions. This is drip pricing, making a product seem affordable by revealing hidden charges

only gradually. When big players use such tactics, smaller regional players often follow. One senior executive at a Zepto competitor said that they use prompts like spend 100 more for free delivery when a card totals 400, or warnings like only two bananas left,

or hurry, three Brinjolson stock to create urgency. In reality, the stock is rarely that low. Interestingly, complaints about Zepto's practices peaked as its annualized gross order value searched from $1 billion to $4 billion in a year. Swiggy Instamarts is over $2 billion and Blinkets is around $4.5 billion. So the trade-off is quite clear. Companies are boosting revenue at the cost of transparency. Average order values have gone up on all three platforms with features like max saver,

super saver and value packs and pushing the customers towards larger bus. skisggy's shareholder letter says that Max Saver gently nudges users towards stockup behaviour and adjacent purchase needs. Zomato's letter notes higher margins driven by bigger orders, ad monetization, platform fee and cost efficiencies. And yet, profitability remains elusive. So, companies are desperate to scale and improve their metrics. And dark patterns seem like the best, if not the only way to do both.

Stay tuned for more on this. It's simply that dark patterns exist. It is that they are rewarded. The growth at any cost mindset that comes from Silicon Valley's growth hacking culture of the early 2000s, that era gave rise to A-B testing, comparing versions of a webpage or an app screen to see which one performs better. The purpose was to make small design changes that maximize sign-ups and reduced drop-offs. But over time, it became a metric obsessive. form of manipulation.

Big Tech still has systems in place. Research phases, internal reviews by other designers, legal and privacy checks. But when Indian companies copied that model, those safeguards often disappeared. Teams are financially incentivized on KPIs like daily active users, session time or average order value. But growth-linked incentives are rarely paired with ethical checks. In some companies, if an engineer adds a major. misleading feature and isn't called out by senior management, it signals acceptance.

Soon, it becomes a part of the culture. Many product leaders don't even see these patterns as manipulative. They judge them purely on performance. Anything that improves the bottom line is fair game. But some are easier to justify than others. Zepto's swap and save suggests cheaper alternatives in your cart and on the surface it helps customers save, but in reality it pushes private labels and serves brand goals. Product decisions are often based on biased testing.

Set up to produce results leadership wants, user needs are secondary. With regulators circling, companies may have to fix the problem or hide it better. The September 5th deadline is approaching. Product teams are asking how close they can get to the red line without crossing it. Guard rails exist to protect the problem. business and the user. But when dark patterns become normal, the guardrails start enabling the behavior instead. One example of this is pre-enrolling users in buy now, pay later without clear consent. It looks like a convenience, but it can become a debt trap. The government's new

Dictad is a step forward, but there is no audit framework with clear benchmarks. And without that, companies will shift from obvious traps to subtle nudges that pass unnoticed. And this is a gap between compliance and ethics. Many dark patterns are legal but not ethical. And they operate in a grey zone. And the big players use lobbying power to shape policy. In 2020, e-commerce associations, including Amazon representatives, lobbied against clauses banning deep discounts and flash sales.

And the government diluted those provisions. In 2023, Amazon India was censured for pre-selecting paid price. subscriptions. By 2024, it still had over 65 million prime viewers in India. And that could happen again. The current push may collapse into a practical compliance and businesses will just go on more discreetly. Because the checkout page is still the hottest property on sale. People's blind spots are still companies' biggest opportunities. So the question isn't whether consumer tech companies will cross the ethical line. It is how cleverly they can dance around it without getting caught.

After all, dark patterns are not a bug. They are a feature. Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of the Ken, India's first subscriber-focused business news platform. What you're listening to is just a small sample of our subscriber-only offerings. A full subscription unlocks daily long-form feature stories, newsletters and podcast extras. To subscribe, head to the ken.com and click on the red subscribe button on top of the Ken website.

Today's episode was hosted by Snigda Sharma and edited by Rajiv CN.