There are No Girls on the Internet as a production of IHeart Radio and Unbossed Creative.

I'm Bridget Todd, and this is There Are No Girls on the Internet.

I am here with my producer, Mike.

Mike, welcome back to the show. It's great to have you back.

Bridget, it's good to be back. I'm excited to get into all the news from the internet that people might have mixed.

Okay, so let's do it. If you have ever bought anything from Amazon.com, you might want to check to make sure that you did not accidentally subscribe to Amazon Prime, because you might be paying $140 a year to Amazon without even knowing it.

And that's because, according to a new lawsuit from the FTC, Amazon executives were okay with people being secretly signed up for Amazon Prime memberships without their knowledge.

This has to do with a practice called dark patterns,

which is when websites use kind of like iffy practices

to trick us into clicking on things that we don't actually want to click on,

or making it hard for us to click on things that they don't want us to click on,

like us finding that hidden unsubscribe button.

According to Verge, the lawsuit says that Amazon

tricked millions of people into unwittingly subscribing to Amazon Prime through buttons

that were presented prominently during checkout. Their complaint includes internal messages and the names

of three specific senior Amazon leaders who allegedly played a key role in this scheme.

So these three specific Amazon higher-ups who were named in the complaint were warned that Amazon was using these deceptive

tactics to create an enrollment process for Prime that was easy for customers to accidentally trigger.

Amazon employees were expressing concerns to company leadership about these strategies in 2016, but those

executives took no action. For example, Amazon designers once asked Neil Lindsay, the senior vice

president who oversaw Amazon Prime, about how the company was tricking people into signing up

for Prime. And Lindsay, according to the lawsuit, said that Amazon was okay with that because,

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