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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: 4, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Thursday August 13 2020, @11:39PM (11 children)
What are some alternatives to Facebook? I looked at Diaspora, but didn't like that you have to "join" a particular server, instead of having your account more universal.
As for dark patterns, that's been going on for decades. It's the grocery store putting the milk all the way in the back, to force customers to walk past everything else. It's toothpaste commercials showing toothpaste applied along the length of the brush, instead across the width. It's voice mail interfaces designed to burn your minutes. It's the slimy car salesperson also trying to burn your time, drag out the process, in order to pressure you into paying more so you don't have to start over. A classic is "bait and switch."
Heck, the entire discipline of marketing seems to have degenerated into manipulation. They're always testing the boundaries, seeing how much exaggeration they can do. There is such a thing as honest marketing. I think.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by c0lo on Friday August 14 2020, @02:02AM (5 children)
Nothing is better than Facebook. Much better, in fact.
Translation: the best alternative that I found - use nothing, nada, zip, don't use it or any social media alternatives.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Funny) by fustakrakich on Friday August 14 2020, @02:08AM (1 child)
You can make millions using Facebook's, and youtube's advertising services
C'mon! Give it a try! You know you want to
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 3, Funny) by c0lo on Friday August 14 2020, @04:18AM
I can also waste my lifetime by doing it. Which is a more probable outcome.
Actually, I don't.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 5, Disagree) by Aegis on Friday August 14 2020, @02:08PM (2 children)
I love how everybody pretends that Soylent News isn't social media...
(Score: 4, Interesting) by c0lo on Friday August 14 2020, @11:49PM (1 child)
Well, you can look at it this way, but there are some major specific differences**.
1. not all Internet forums are social media, even if they can be used for "virtual socialization". I'm not publishing data about myself on S/N, I'm discussing news, ideas, etc.
From reading my posts on S/N, you don't get what my everyday life looks like, neither what I'm buying, or who my real-world friends are, or what other sites I'm visiting. Very little of my "social" transpires on S/N - and I like it this way.
2. I'm a paying customer for S/N (are you?), not a merchandise
---
** You know? Like in "genus proximum and differentia specifica"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 15 2020, @12:57AM
The closest thing to social media on SoylentNews is the journal. It's a minor part of the site, and it's not really a feed that notifies you of friends' posts. SoylentNews also doesn't support uploading your photos, videos, or podcasts.
SoylentNews is also not exactly a free-for-all either. It is closely curated to the point that NOTHING makes it to the home page without being explicitly approved. Social media sites typically have all that automated to simply put up highly active or highly "up-voted" material.
Discussions on stories themselves are far more open, but even there the off-topic banter is often moderated down to -1. Of course it's all there for anyone that cares to look and moderators do occasionally have to rescue posts from poor moderation from time to time. However, none of that makes it a social media site.
While SoylentNews does have broader subjects to cover than say, a forum on cars, it's about in the same category. It's mostly general discussion, and often not about the person or people having the discussion(unless you're talking about insults being hurled about).
Claiming all discussion forums are "social media" is about as lame as people I see calling every funny photo a "meme."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 14 2020, @02:09AM (3 children)
Honest marketing entails selling a product on it's merits. If you have an interior product that is more expensive, it doesn't work well.
(Score: 3, Touché) by mhajicek on Friday August 14 2020, @04:42AM (2 children)
Exterior products work better.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 14 2020, @05:40AM
I hate cell phone keyboards so much.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 14 2020, @09:23AM
That sort of depends on the product, I would think.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Sunday August 16 2020, @06:47PM
If you have a domain name and an always-on computer with an Internet connection allowing inbound TCP, you can operate your own Diaspora pod or Mastodon instance.