How "dark defaults" could cost you

The Indicator from Planet Money

NPR

Business

4.7 • 9.5K Ratings

🗓️ 22 November 2023

⏱️ 10 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A lot of people have experienced some version of this: You sign up for the free one-week trial of some subscription service, only later to be surprised when you get a bill for the deluxe, forever plan. Or you log into a website once, and now your inbox is a flood of promotional emails. All because of a little pre-checked box tucked away, unnoticed.

But what if that pesky, pre-checked box cost you thousands of dollars?

On today's show, how some political campaigns used 'dark defaults' to raise millions of dollars from unsuspecting donors.

Related Episodes: Confused when online shopping? It might be a Dark Pattern

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Transcript

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0:00.0	NPR. Back in the fall of 2020, Ron Majuri wanted to donate some of his money to
0:16.1	political campaigns. Like it or not he says, campaigns run on cash. They need
0:21.6	money in order to get the message out and to drive votes.
0:26.3	Ron lives in Florida, he's an entrepreneur and a Republican.
0:29.8	So he went online and found the typical calls to action.
0:33.6	Donate, we have to win, we have to save the country, you know, the whole, the whole
0:38.0	schmeal.
0:39.1	And Ron remembers donating a few thousand bucks in one-off contributions to a few political campaigns.
0:45.0	But later on he got an alert from his credit card company saying that these campaigns wanted to charge him more,
0:51.0	around $20,000 more.
0:54.0	I don't want to say I was upset,
0:55.8	but I was definitely concerned
0:59.6	that they could do that so easily.
1:03.6	Pretty philosophical for $20,000 he's not expecting.
1:06.6	Oh, Schmeal.
1:10.6	This is the indicator for Planet Money.
1:12.0	I'm Adrian Ma.
1:13.0	And I'm Darren Woods. A recent study finds that some political campaigns have raised millions of dollars from people who didn't even intend to donate that money.
1:22.0	It's all thanks to a very subtle design tweak. It's
1:25.4	something that we run into all the time and everyday life. So today on the show
1:29.2	we'll talk to the researchers behind that study about the power of something they call dark defaults.
1:35.0	And we'll learn what Ron did about that surprise 20 grand credit card charge.
	...

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