Trushant Mehta is a philomath and a sedulous and inquisitive tech evangelist. He cofounded and serves as CTO of OpenEyes Technologies Inc.gettyWhen AI advancements happen in EdTech, the media notices. When a platform raises Series A, B or C funding—or crosses 1 million active learners—it becomes a success story, a headline, an award or a founder profile in a trade publication. But there is a quieter, less flattering story unfolding inside many of those same platforms, one that rarely makes headlines until a regulator forces it to.That story is of dark patterns: interface designs deliberately engineered to manipulate users into choices they would not freely make. In e-commerce, they are well-documented; a decade of regulatory action and research has made the tactics familiar. In EdTech, they are a problem the industry has been slow to confront honestly, in part because the sector still relies on a reputation of good intentions that few other software categories get to keep.I build software for educators and credentialing bodies, which means I sit close enough to this industry to see what gets celebrated and what gets quietly tolerated.The Manipulation The Industry Rarely NamesDark patterns in EdTech cluster around a familiar set of tactics. Subscription enrollment is frictionless; cancellation requires navigating a labyrinth of buried links, retention prompts and misleading menu options. Free trials auto-convert to paid plans without clear disclosure. Countdown timers manufacture urgency on evergreen content. Progress bars are engineered to create lock-in, not learning.These are not hypothetical. The regulatory record is unambiguous. In 2020, ABCmouse, a learning platform for children aged 2 to 8, paid $10 million to settle FTC charges after tens of thousands of customers were renewed without consent. The cancellation path was deliberately buried. In a dissenting statement pushing the agency to go further, FTC Commissioner Rohit Chopra described the company as a "roach motel." The platform had advertised "easy cancellation."Five years later, the pattern repeated at scale. In September 2025, Chegg, a publicly traded homework-help company serving millions of high school and college students, settled for $7.5 million after the FTC found it had charged nearly 200,000 consumers after they had already requested cancellation. Internal records showed that the company was aware of the problem. The settlement required that cancellation be no harder than sign-up, a standard that I believe should never have required a federal order to enforce.These are not outliers. A 2024 FTC and ICPEN review of 642 subscription platforms found that almost 76% used at least one dark pattern, and two-thirds used multiple. I've seen this time and time again in the industry: Once people feel manipulated into staying subscribed, they don’t just cancel; they stop trusting the brand altogether, and they tell others.Why Education Is DifferentDark patterns in streaming or retail are bad. In EdTech, they carry a different weight entirely.The reason is trust. When a learner signs up for a certification program or a child enrolls in an online learning tool, there is an implicit social contract: "This platform is invested in my progress." That assumption of alignment is what makes education marketing so effective—and what makes dark patterns in this context a deeper betrayal than a manipulative checkout flow on a shopping site.There is also a structural vulnerability that does not exist in most SaaS relationships. A student in mid-certification cannot simply switch platforms without losing months of progress or employer reimbursement eligibility. Dark patterns exploit exactly this sunk-cost pressure. And unlike the average consumer app user, a significant share of EdTech’s audience is made up of parents of young children, first-generation students, mid-career professionals reskilling under financial pressure—key groups that are susceptible to manipulation.The Regulatory Floor And The Business Case Above ItThe regulatory environment is shifting. The FTC’s Restore Online Shoppers’ Confidence Act has become the primary enforcement tool in the U.S. India’s Central Consumer Protection Authority issued binding dark pattern guidelines in 2023, ranking EdTech among the highest-risk sectors. The EU’s Digital Services Act imposes new design obligations on large platforms that touch manipulative interface choices. The EU AI Act goes further still, banning AI systems that exploit vulnerabilities tied to age or economic situation and specifically prohibiting emotion-recognition AI in educational institutions—a direct acknowledgment that this sector’s users warrant a higher bar. But regulation is a floor, not a ceiling. The more important question is what EdTech companies will choose to do before a regulator forces their hand. The answer should not be complicated. Cancellation must be as easy as enrollment. Auto-renewal must be disclosed in the same visual weight as the price. Urgency must be real; a course that has existed for three years is not expiring in 11 hours. Learner data must serve learning outcomes, not conversion funnels.This isn’t only an ethical argument; it’s a commercial one. In B2B EdTech, this is even more important: professional associations, universities and workforce programs conduct due diligence before procurement. A platform with documented dark pattern settlements is a reputational liability for every institution that recommends it. The learner who struggled to cancel will not return. And they will tell the organization that referred them.Building The EdTech Industry We PromisedDark patterns are ultimately a leadership choice. They do not emerge from rogue engineers or accidental design. They emerge when executives decide that retention metrics matter more than learner trust, especially when no one in the room asks the harder question: Would we be comfortable if our users could see exactly what we designed and why?GovTech is learning to pair innovation with accountability. FinTech is being held to transparency standards once resisted. EdTech’s moment of reckoning is already underway. The only question is whether the industry leads that change or waits to be dragged through it.The platforms that want to grow through the next decade must treat ethical design not as a constraint on performance, but as the foundation of it. The classroom is not a funnel, and the companies that truly believe that will be the ones that get to keep building it.​Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?