Dark Patterns and CX Ethics: What the Amazon Prime Case Reveals About Customer Experience Leadership

Dark patterns expose deeper ethical issues in the customer experience profession that can no longer be ignored. Virtue ethics may be a starting point for pushing the boundaries of traditional CX practice into prioritizing ethics.

When you’ve struggled to cancel a subscription, waited on hold for what feels like forever, or battled confusing website flows, what does that friction say about a company’s and its leaders’ attitudes and ethical principles toward its customers?

Amazon Prime's Case: A Wake-Up Call for Ethical CX Leadership

Recently, Amazon agreed to pay a $2.5 billion settlement over its Prime subscription flows. If you were a customer, signing up for Prime was effortless. Cancelling, though, required navigating a four-page, six-click, fifteen-option process. This was a violation of the law, according to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC).

What Dark Patterns Reveal About CX Ethics

Such design tricks are known as dark patterns, manipulative design choices that trap, trick, or confuse customers into making choices they might not otherwise make, usually so a company can make or retain revenue. It’s not just poor UX design. It’s a moral decision on the part of people responsible for the company’s performance and culture.

Like sludge, which I have written and spoken about before, dark patterns make tasks harder for customers. While Amazon admitted no wrongdoing, an FTC spokesperson said Amazon knew it would likely lose in court, prompting the historic, pro-customer settlement.

Why The Amazon Case Invites a Discussion on Customer Experience Ethics

Ethics has never been a prominent part of CX leadership development, so the profession has been missing a vocabulary for what’s at stake when friction is purposefully built into a customer’s day. But this can be easily changed.

Five Virtue Ethics Principles for Customer Experience Leaders

Virtue ethics, an Aristotelian-era way of thinking, offers a lens for CX decision-making. Here are five tips for embracing it.

• If making money is the goal, pause and reflect, “How are we going to reach this goal?” Strive to do the right thing for the right reasons.

• Ethics grow from daily habits. When you see others showing virtue, as a leader, you reinforce it, because not everyone is born with an understanding of virtue.

• Decisions aren’t always black-and-white. Balance competing values like fairness, care, and honesty. It’s about doing what’s good and what works.

• Intent matters as much as outcomes. It's tough because what’s good for a company or its shareholders isn’t necessarily what is best for customers.

• True success means helping people thrive. In business, that means designing experiences that don’t exploit people. You make the right choice, even if it means you might not receive kudos.

How Do Leaders' Ethical Values Shape Customer Experience?

Most organizational leaders don’t necessarily set out to deceive. But their actions and values do play a significant role in setting organizations' ethical climate. They set the tone for the context employees find themselves operating within every day.

Virtue ethics is a lens for seeing where performance goals quietly cross into manipulation. Leaders can build trust with customers when they build systems that value relationship-building and integrity.

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