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from the honesty:-the-absence-of-the-intent-to-deceive dept.
Glyn Moody writes a blog post at Private Internet Access about how users are steered into accepting terms and conditions which are against their own interests. Even after the advent of the GDPR, and even though users theoretically can change their privacy settings to optimize protection for their personal data, they usually don't. One of the reasons is because it requires effort and thus people mostly accept the defaults through inaction. However, it turns out there are other issues because of the use of user interfaces carefully crafted to trick users into doing things they might not otherwise do, a practice some label "dark patterns".
Brignull runs a site called Dark Patterns, which includes a “hall of shame” with real-life examples of dark patterns, and a list of common types. One of these is “Privacy Zuckering”, where “You are tricked into publicly sharing more information about yourself than you really intended to. Named after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.” A free report, “Deceived by Design“, funded by the Norwegian Consumer Council, reveals that top sites have recently been engaging in “Privacy Zuckering” to undermine the GDPR and its privacy protections. The report explores how Facebook, Google and Microsoft handled the process of updating their privacy settings to meet the GDPR’s more stringent requirements. Specifically, the researchers explored a “Review your data settings” pop-up from Facebook, “A privacy reminder” pop-up from Google, and a Windows 10 Settings page presented as part of a system update. Both Facebook and Google fare badly in terms of protecting privacy by default.
More details can be found in a report by the Norwegian Consumer Council, entitled Deceived by Design: How tech companies use dark patterns to discourage us from exercising our rights to privacy (warning for PDF).
(Score: 5, Funny) by DeVilla on Monday July 16 2018, @02:38AM (5 children)
To see the Hall of Shame you have to allow Twitter to run javascript in your browser.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 16 2018, @03:08AM (1 child)
Twitter is for Twits.
Javascript ? No thanks.
End of story.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 16 2018, @05:46AM
It's for twats too, you sexist clod.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 16 2018, @03:49AM (2 children)
True. I block twits and google analytics thus the website doesn't work. I just close it and move on. Their loss, not mine.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 16 2018, @05:32AM
If only javacript and tracker blocking came disabled by default...
...and only could be enabled tru a deceiving and convolute browser privacy protections reminder menu...
...and that anyway it would autodisable on every update, or... randomly.
(Score: 2) by Bethany.Saint on Friday July 20 2018, @10:04AM
>> I just close it and move on. Their loss, not mine.
Actually not. This is a common misconception that it's "their loss." In fact, letting you view the content while disabling ads and tracking and such is when it becomes their loss. From their financial perspective they're better off not having you visit the site if you're disabling revenue generation. For the time being there are plenty of others who visit the site as designed and those are the users the sites want. Right now you're someplace between irrelevant and annoying.