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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: 4, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 16 2018, @01:32AM (6 children)
But the free market will fix this all, because when Amazon is your only option to go buy shit, you can always choose not to buy from Amazon, amirite?
(Score: 2) by unauthorized on Monday July 16 2018, @09:13AM
Very much this. Libertarian zealots need to get it through their thick skulls that the overwhelming majority is naturally apathetic about the majority of issues, and increased personal responsibility is not going to change that.
People today are as apathetic as ever despite having personal political power at a scale that has never before been seen outside the hands of the ownership class, be they patricians, nobility or capitalists. This is despite living in an age where information is instantaneously and universally available all the time.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday July 16 2018, @03:39PM (4 children)
Or you can buy from the many competitors to Amazon. In a free market, nothing stops you from typing in other companies's URLs. It's a myth that monopolies are the natural endstate of free markets.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 16 2018, @07:13PM (3 children)
[Evidence needed]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday July 17 2018, @12:33AM (2 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 17 2018, @12:27PM (1 child)
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday July 17 2018, @10:08PM
And Standard Oil was already well on its way to losing it's monopoly (a monopoly formed, I might add, by massively undercutting existing competition) at the time it was broken up.
(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.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Mykl on Monday July 16 2018, @04:09AM
When a company's entire business model depends on selling user information to marketers, it's entirely unsurprising that they will want to make it hard for their users to hide that very information upon which the life of the company depends.
Sadly, I think it's also why we are unlikely to see a privacy-respecting product become a serious competitor to the likes of Facebook et al. In order to bring in enough funding to produce something on that scale, without selling data on the side, you'd have to end up charging your users for access to your product. And we all know how much consumers like paying for SAAS, right?
For all of it's sins, Apple does have some good cred in the privacy department. Apple Pay, for example, is suprisingly good in this respect, and does not provide your bank with a field day of consumer habits the way that VISA, Mastercard etc do. iPhones are also less prone to over-sharing private details of their users (yes, there are some exceptions, but on the whole they are far more privacy-conscious than Google will ever be).
(Score: 4, Touché) by maxwell demon on Monday July 16 2018, @06:59AM (2 children)
So how serious shall I take an internet privacy group that uses Google Analytics on their web site?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 16 2018, @06:50PM
that's a fair criticism and i would agree that they shouldn't use GA, but they donate to a lot of privacy/freedom related projects(with real money/amounts), have supposedly (i didn't actually investigate) proven they don't keep logs with their vpn service via legal proceedings and write articles like this in their blog. They are legitimate privacy and freedom advocates from what i can tell. Also, their site looks old. GA may have seemed more innocent when that decision was made. Of course, if someone has evidence that PIA is a honeypot i'm all ears.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 16 2018, @09:28PM
They probably don't run their own page, and are blocking it when visiting the site from home.
I've seen more ignorant things being done, like vegans eating jello and so on, but it happens.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by MostCynical on Monday July 16 2018, @09:16AM (1 child)
So, you would like to opt out? Certainly please fill in this form, confirming all the data we have on you, and this additional form with all the stuff we've worked out, or just guessed. If we've made any mistakes, just correct them, and sign at the bottom. My assistant will be along in a moment to take the blood sample.
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 16 2018, @05:12PM
A party associate will arrive shortly to collect you for your party.
(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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