[nborwankar]

Slightly unconnected but I’ve found a rather disturbing “dark pattern” in Amazon sales of food items in CA.

Background: CA requires a warning on food that has some threshold level of carcinogenic or harmful substance - esp lead and arsenic. It’s called CA 65 Warning or a Proposition 65 warning.

I make sure to look for these on the images of labels and ingredients when I buy food especially ground spices off Amazon.

The dark pattern: Label images show no CA 65 warning but when the food turns up it has such a warning! I bought bulk powdered cinnamon with this issue.

Recently I noticed that while Amazon does not show the warning on the label it has an innocuous small print link in your shopping cart that leads to the full text of the warning should you notice it and click on it

This is now in the vicinity of actually increasing the probability of physical harm. Because of not having the warning in the label AND having an almost ignorable warning at checkout when you are more focused on getting things done and move on to the next thing, as opposed to when you are in a more deliberative state while browsing.

Just want to put that out for folks in CA who might care about such things. I’m sure they wouldn’t try shtuff like this in EU.

[Slow_Hand]

My guess is that their product page (which serves the rest of the country too) doesn’t feature the label in it’s image because it’s not relevant to anyone outside of CA. Perhaps Oregon has it’s own version of CA 65 with a different warning label, but that wouldn’t be relevant to anyone outside of OR so it’s not prominent in the product page.

I suppose they could display regional versions of the product page based on geolocation, but that’s a huge layer of added complexity and they may not be legally required to alter their website to comply.

So I’d chalk it up to neglect or indifference, rather than a deliberate dark pattern.