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How Facebook and Other Sites Manipulate Your Privacy Choices:
Electronic Frontier Foundation was fed up with Facebook's pushy interface. The platform had a way of coercing people into giving up more and more of their privacy. The question was, what to call that coercion? Zuckermining? Facebaiting? Was it a Zuckerpunch? The name that eventually stuck: Privacy Zuckering, or when "you are tricked into publicly sharing more information about yourself than you really intended to."
[...] Researchers call these design and wording decisions "dark patterns," a term applied to UX that tries to manipulate your choices. When Instagram repeatedly nags you to "please turn on notifications," and doesn't present an option to decline? That's a dark pattern. When LinkedIn shows you part of an InMail message in your email, but forces you to visit the platform to read more? Also a dark pattern. When Facebook redirects you to "log out" when you try to deactivate or delete your account? That's a dark pattern too.
Dark patterns show up all over the web, nudging people to subscribe to newsletters, add items to their carts, or sign up for services. But, says says Colin Gray, a human-computer interaction researcher at Purdue University, they're particularly insidious "when you're deciding what privacy rights to give away, what data you're willing to part with." Gray has been studying dark patterns since 2015. He and his research team have identified five basic types: nagging, obstruction, sneaking, interface interference, and forced action. All of those show up in privacy controls. He and other researchers in the field have noticed the cognitive dissonance between Silicon Valley's grand overtures toward privacy and the tools to modulate these choices, which remain filled with confusing language, manipulative design, and other features designed to leech more data.
Those privacy shell games aren't limited to social media. They've become endemic to the web at large, especially in the wake of Europe's General Data Protection Regulation. Since GDPR went into effect in 2018, websites have been required to ask people for consent to collect certain types of data. But some consent banners simply ask you to accept the privacy policies—with no option to say no. "Some research has suggested that upwards of 70 percent of consent banners in the EU have some kind of dark pattern embedded in them," says Gray. "That's problematic when you're giving away substantial rights."
[...] Many of these dark patterns are used to juice metrics that indicate success, like user growth or time spent. Gray cites an example from the smartphone app Trivia Crack, which nags its users to play another game every two to three hours. Those kinds of spammy notifications have been used by social media platforms for years to induce the kind of FOMO that keeps you hooked. "We know if we give people things like swiping or status updates, it's more likely that people will come back and see it again and again," says Yocco. "That can lead to compulsive behaviors."
[...] Worse, Gray says, the research shows that most people don't even know they're being manipulated. But according to one study, he says, "when people were primed ahead of time with language to show what manipulation looked like, twice as many users could identify these dark patterns." At least there's some hope that greater awareness can give users back some of their control.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 14 2020, @04:17PM (4 children)
No, not necessarily, but if they don't see an immediate penalty, they don't care. It is exactly what is happening with wearing face masks. People aren't dropping in the streets, the ones who die do that two or more weeks later, and "it's an old person thing" anyway so they very loudly invoke their First Amendment Right not to be fored to wear one (regardless of the issue, if it has anything to do with guns, they invoke the 2nd, and everything else must therefore be for/against the First). If it was a very very contagious disease and people who had it were walking around oozing pus like zombies and it only attacked the Farm Belt, those same people would be screaming for a mask mandate. (Or if a President Biden said that you didn't need to wear masks, because after all, "fundamental political principles" these days are based upon the opposite of what "libs" want, regardless of whether something made sense or not).
(Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Friday August 14 2020, @05:51PM (3 children)
Great. Another damn mask nazi. The other day I had to work in a very hot environment around some other people and was required to wear a mask. Once the temperatures and humidity got near 100 I literally could not breath and very nearly passed out before taking the thing off. I was using the exact same kind of mask as everyone else. Please do tell me what I'm doing so horribly wrong, because I seriously want to know. Aside from generally being out of shape and never having had to work in such an environment before, I honestly don't know because nobody ever tells me anything.
But everything has to be absolutes, no exceptions, because the TV says so. Next time I'll let myself suffocate just to make you idiot people happy.
(Score: 0, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 15 2020, @04:12AM (1 child)
You're fat and sweaty and gonna die of COVID this year. Enjoy your mask-free time.
(Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Saturday August 15 2020, @03:00PM
As somebody who has already painfully had this stupid virus, FUCK YOU!
When you get it, you will probably be gunking all over the break room appliances giving it to everyone else, while believing your mask made you invulnerable.
At this point, I only wish it had killed me.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 15 2020, @01:36PM
You're not doing anything wrong, your employer is. Report them to OSHA if you're in a blue state, get a better job otherwise.