A term I had not seen before, but its wide use for malicious activities in smartphones is described here. Considerable detail below.
A Vector for Skulduggery By Paul Marks in CACM
March 31, 2020
Dark Patterns.
An analysis of hundreds of popular smartphone apps found that 95% of them have user interfaces that use "Dark Patterns," maliciously crafted menus, buttons, and sliders designed to deceive users into either buying goods or services they do not want, or leading them into unknowingly selecting risky privacy settings.
Dark Patterns are a well-known vector for skulduggery on websites, and have been studied and called out over the last decade, most notably by the name-and-shame website darkpatterns.org, founded by Brighton, U.K.-based user experience (UX) specialist and cognitive scientist Harry Brignull. It was Brignull who first coined the term Dark Pattern (DP).
The chief types of malicious activity DPs enable include sneaking unwanted items (like insurance for other goods being bought) into online shopping baskets, signing users up to expensive recurring magazine subscriptions, or misleading people with preselected sliders labelled with baffling double-negative instructions (like "uncheck here not to download the add-on").
How prevalent Dark Patterns are in the smartphone app arena, rather than regular websites, was not known, so a team of human-computer interaction experts led by Linda di Geronimo, formerly of the University of Zurich, Switzerland, (and now technical cooperation manager in the Zurich Research Center of Huawei), set out to find out just how pervasive Dark Patterns are in the mobile arena. ... "
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