Cancelling your Adobe subscription can be confusing and pricey, and a new U.S. Justice Department suit argues the company deceptively designed it to be that way.

The Justice Department filed a lawsuit against Adobe Monday that accuses the software company of violating the Restore Online Shoppers’ Confidence Act (ROSCA), meant to protect consumers from unfair or deceptive practices, and from being charged for transactions that aren’t clearly disclosed.

The suit against Adobe

Attorneys for the Justice Department allege in the suit that Adobe hides the cancellation terms of its “annual, paid monthly” subscription “in fine print and behind optional text boxes and hyperlinks” during the sign-up process, and only clearly discloses those terms when users try to end their subscription. That makes the company’s sign-up process a “powerful retention tool” that traps consumers in subscriptions they no longer want, according to the Justice Department.

“For years, Adobe has harmed consumers by enrolling them in its default, most lucrative subscription plan without clearly disclosing important plan terms,” the suit says. “Adobe fails to adequately disclose to consumers that by signing up for the ‘Annual, Paid Monthly’ subscription plan, they are agreeing to a year-long commitment and a hefty early-termination fee that can amount to hundreds of dollars.”

In the suit, filed in the U.S. District Court in the Northern District of California, attorneys lay out Adobe’s enrollment flow and note that the cancellation process is purposefully cumbersome. Users are required to login again to their Adobe accounts and navigate through multiple pages and pop-ups when they try to cancel, including a mandatory feedback page that requires users to enter a reason for cancelling and fails to inform them than the cancellation process hasn’t yet been completed. And good luck trying to contact customer support.

“Subscribers who have attempted to cancel via customer service have encountered several obstacles that impede or delay their attempts to cancel,” the suit reads. “Many subscribers attempting to cancel via phone or chat have been subjected to a time-consuming and burdensome process.” (We reached out to Adobe for comment, and will update the story if we hear back.)

Bringing dark patterns to light

The suit also brings to light “dark patterns,” or deceptive interface patterns, that trick users into taking unintended actions. In the case of Adobe, the Justice Department alleges the company is using the tactic to manipulate users into signing up for expensive subscriptions—that are also designed to be hard to break. Broadly, manipulative tactics like the ones alleged by the Justice Department are becoming a common sight online: a 2019 Princeton study found instances of dark patterns on more than 11% of websites.

The suit filed (July 08, 2024) against Adobe is one of many the Justice Department has filed in recent years, as dark patterns become an increased priority for investigation. Last year, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) accused Amazon’s Prime sign-up process of being similarly deceptive in a lawsuit that claimed the online retailer enrolled consumers into the program without their consent and made it hard to cancel. A trial is set for June 2025.

The FTC released a report on dark patterns in 2022, which focused on four common tactics, including misleading consumers and disguising ads, making it difficult to cancel subscriptions or charges, burying key terms and junk fees, and tricking consumers into sharing data, and provided examples of their use. According to the report, the FTC has taken action against CreditKarma, LendingClub, and Vizio, also for their alleged use of dark patterns.

The increasing prevalence of dark patterns shows just how easily—and how subtly—design strategies can evolve from “user-centered” to business-centered, prioritizing user flows that are designed to encourage maximum profit over maximum transparency. In short, these design practices are bad for consumers but good for a company’s bottom line. That is until the federal government argues that they break the law.

The suit against Adobe says the company’s enrollment practices ”have generated frequent complaints from subscribers,” including to the Better Business Bureau, on social media, and on Adobe’s community support pages. If the company doesn’t face consequences, the Justice Department says, it’s “likely to continue to injure consumers and harm the public interest.”

And it seems the government is increasingly interested in cracking down on this design problem. “More and more companies are using digital dark patterns to trick people into buying products and giving away their personal information,” Samuel Levine, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection said back in 2022, adding that their cases “send a clear message that these traps will not be tolerated.”