Noom and Deceptive Website Design
A lawsuit filed in New York against weight loss app Noom claims that the company manipulates consumers into auto-enrollment and -renewing subscriptions by luring them with “free trial” offers. The plaintiffs claim that the company tricks New York consumers into buying “multi-month ‘diet’ plans that they never wanted and never use and that they do it through deceptive website design.
The complaint alleges that Noom claims to use a “cognitive-behavioral approach” to offer a “supposedly revolutionary diet” but that “where the psychology most comes into play is getting enormous numbers of consumers to hand over their credit card information for a free trial without realizing they will later be auto-enrolled into perpetually ‘renewing’ multi-month diet plans.” There are two particularly devious features of Noom’s program according to the complaint – first, the subscription must be cancelled by the end of the trial period or it is automatically renewing; and second, the trial is difficult to cancel.
Auto-enrollment and -renewing subscriptions in general are fine print traps for the unwary, but the allegations in the complaint indicate that Noom’s program are especially worrisome for those concerned about algorithmic and website design manipulations – the so-called “dark patterns.” The co-founder of the company, Artem Petakov, is a former Google engineer who studied psychology and computer science at Princeton and according to the complaint, “rather than employing cognitive behavioral therapy to benefit consumers” uses this “scientific knowledge to take advantage of the consuming public, as its entire sales and automatic renewal model is designed to exploit well-studied weaknesses in human decision-making.”
The complaint contains a series of screenshots which reveal how a consumer might be lured into signing up. The consumer answers 18 questions about diet and weight loss after which Noom “supposedly calculates the quiz’s results but does not disclose them to the consumer.” In order to get the results, the consumer has to enter an email to “see how much weight you can lose for good with Noom.” There are other tactics employed here, such as payment page that looks more like a donation page and a “countdown clock” to lend a sense of urgency to the entire process and make the consumer less careful. The auto-subscription information is in fine-print and “designed to be overlooked.”
The complaint alleges that the company “buries its charges by not sending consumers a receipt when it charges for the full, multi-month diet plan” and does not otherwise provide payment confirmation (which would alert consumers to the fact that the trial program has ended and that they were automatically enrolled into the paying portion of the program). According to the complaint, Noom makes it “extremely difficult for consumers to cancel their trial membership.” Apparently, the consumer who signs up for the trial, can’t go to “Settings” and cancel the subscription but has to contact a virtual trainer. These are all obstacles that make it easy to hide unwanted charges from a consumer.
There’s more – the complaint is 86 pages long – and I can’t summarize it all here. But the complaint provides an excellent illustration of how companies can use the insights from behavioral economics and social psychology to manipulate and mislead consumers.
(H/T to Mark Budnitz)