What are dark patterns in cookie banners?

Dark patterns are banner designs that push visitors toward accepting: a bright accept button with a hidden reject option, confusing wording, or extra clicks to refuse. EU regulators treat them as invalid consent collection, and several enforcement actions have targeted exactly this.

What enforcement looks for

Regulators check symmetry: refusing must be as easy as accepting, on the same layer, in equally visible styling. Pre-ticked boxes, consent implied by scrolling, and reject paths buried in settings menus all fail.

The business case against them

Beyond enforcement risk, dark patterns generate low-quality consent that users withdraw or ignore, and platforms like Google require genuine consent signals for their consent-mode features to work at all.