Four exhibits. Real dark patterns, recreated. Your time is the ticket. Walk each exit, watch your clicks and guilt trips add up, and see how long they meant to keep you.
These are hand-built recreations for education and critique — not the original interfaces, and not affiliated with the companies named. Trademarks and product names belong to their owners. A source is cited on every plaque. Nothing here connects to a real account; no data leaves your device.
Every extra screen is a chance you give up. The FTC alleges Amazon named this cancellation flow “Iliad,” after Homer’s long, arduous war.
Source: FTC press release — FTC v. Amazon.com, Inc. — W.D. Wash., filed June 2023
Sign in, forget the password, reset it, then wander a settings labyrinth. Most people quit before they reach the unsubscribe.
Source: deceptive.design — Obstruction — Composite recreation; obstruction patterns catalogued at deceptive.design
A button that insults you for leaving. Shame is friction you cannot click past without feeling it.
Source: deceptive.design — Confirmshaming — Confirmshaming, catalogued at deceptive.design
Fifteen toggles, an ambiguous Save, and the one link that actually works hidden in 8px grey.
Source: deceptive.design — Obstruction — Composite recreation; obstruction patterns catalogued at deceptive.design
Getting out should not require a maze. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission announced a “click-to-cancel” amendment in October 2024, but the Eighth Circuit vacated it in 2025; the FTC’s March 2026 notice reopened the negative-option rulemaking. The design principle also appears in the FTC’s June 2023 complaint alleging Amazon built a Prime cancellation flow it named “Iliad.”
Email has separate provider rules. Google requires covered marketing and subscribed mail from senders of more than 5,000 messages a day to personal Gmail accounts to offer RFC 8058 one-click unsubscribe and process covered requests within two days. Yahoo publishes no matching numeric threshold and accepts a functioning mailto: List-Unsubscribe path while highly recommending POST. The RFC 8058 machine path sends one request; it does not prove the sender later suppresses the address.
Yet the human path — the page a person actually clicks through — is still where the friction hides, and the patterns catalogued at deceptive.design keep showing up. That gap between the one-click machine path and the labyrinth humans are handed is exactly what the Exit Gap Index will measure. The live Exit Gap research queue lists 150 candidate senders and four capability-only observations. It publishes zero honor grades until the repeated-probe evidence gate is met.