South Korea Issues New Guidelines Against Online ‘Dark Patterns’

South Korea’s Fair Trade Commission issued updated guidelines Tuesday aimed at curbing deceptive online interface designs known as “dark patterns,” giving digital platforms more detailed examples of practices that can interfere with informed consumer choices.

The guidance consolidates and updates earlier advice for platform operators. It focuses on designs that can push users into payments, subscriptions or purchasing decisions without a clear understanding of what they have agreed to. The commission said the examples are intended to make compliance expectations easier for online businesses to understand.

Dark patterns can take several forms. A service may enroll a customer in a recurring monthly subscription without making that commitment sufficiently clear, or it may create unnecessary obstacles when the customer later tries to cancel. Other designs can steer users toward purchases by preselecting extras or adding options that the consumer did not affirmatively choose.

The commission advised operators to make cancellation links easy to locate. It said those links should appear on a homepage or in an intuitive account-management area, such as “My Account,” rather than being buried under an unrelated section such as security settings. Platforms were also told not to automatically add options during an ordering process when customers have not explicitly selected them.

The measures target a central feature of digital commerce: the way menus, buttons and default settings shape decisions. Even when the underlying product or subscription terms are available somewhere on a service, an interface can still make a choice harder to understand or reverse. The guidelines therefore place emphasis on accessible cancellation routes and affirmative consumer selection.

The Fair Trade Commission said the guidance would help reduce harm from misleading interfaces and practices that obstruct informed decision-making. It also said it would continue examining emerging forms of consumer harm as online transactions evolve, improve relevant policies and take firm action against violations.

The guidelines themselves are not legally binding. However, the commission stressed that online platform operators remain subject to South Korea’s Act on the Consumer Protection in Electronic Commerce. That distinction means the document functions as practical compliance guidance while the underlying consumer-protection law continues to provide the enforceable framework.

For platform operators, the release offers a clearer checklist for subscription flows, ordering pages and account controls. For consumers, its most visible effects could be simpler cancellation paths, fewer preselected add-ons and clearer consent before recurring charges begin.