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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: 3, Interesting) by darkfeline on Tuesday July 17 2018, @04:07AM
The paper seems biased toward stupidity, for better or worse. They painted deleting Google user data as some mind-wracking task, but I just went to Settings, under Personal Information & Privacy, My Activity (Discover and control the data that's created when you use Google services), Delete Activity By, select All Time and All Products. That seems reasonable to me.
The paper says "Both testers", so I'm guessing they recruited grandma and grandpa? Then, they selected more testers with "varying computer skills", and concluded that some of them were able to delete all data without trouble, presumably the ones who were skilled enough to read English and find the Settings page? Probably even fewer people could figure out how to enable IMAP support in Gmail, and I don't think you can conclude with a straight face that that feature is hidden.
I feel like you have to draw a line somewhere. I have met people who were unable to find the settings menu for applications that use the bog standard cog wheel in the corner. If a company doesn't accommodate these users, it's disingenuous to claim that is shady design.
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