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The Guardian posted a very thoughtful article about manipulation on the Web:
Many nations already enshrine a right not to be defrauded, and even a right not to be deceived. If a company sells you a new medicine, falsely claiming that it prevents cancer, it can be punished. If a firm convinces you to buy a new smartphone, saying that it has state-of-the-art features when it doesn't, it will have violated the law. But in the current era, many companies are taking our time and money not by defrauding or deceiving us, but by practising the dark art of manipulation.
They hide crucial terms in fine print. They automatically enrol you in a programme that costs money but does not benefit you at all. They make it easy for you to subscribe to a service, but extremely hard for you to cancel. They use "drip pricing", by which they quote you an initial number, getting you to commit to the purchase, only to add a series of additional costs, knowing that once you've embarked on the process, you are likely just to say "yeah, whatever". In its worst forms, manipulation is theft. It takes people's resources and attention, and it does so without their consent.
Manipulators are tricksters, and sometimes even magicians. They divert the eye and take advantage of people's weaknesses. Often they exploit simple ignorance. They fail to respect, and try to undermine, people's capacity to make reflective and deliberative choices. A manipulator might convince you to buy a useless health product, not by lying, but by appealing to your emotions, and by painting seductive pictures of how great you will feel once you use the product. Or they might tell you an anecdote about someone just like you, who used a supposed pain-relief product and felt better within 12 hours. Anecdotes have real power – but they can be profoundly misleading.
More insidiously still, manipulators might know about, and enlist, some of the central findings in contemporary behavioural economics, the field that explores how people depart from perfect rationality. All of us are vulnerable in this regard, subject to the "cognitive biases" elaborated by Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky, Richard Thaler and others, that affect our behaviour. These can be hard to recognize, and harder still to overcome.
For example, human beings tend to suffer from "present bias". We care a lot about today and tomorrow, but the future is a foreign country, Laterland, and we are not sure we are ever going to visit. Tactics like "buy now, pay later" take advantage of this. Another bias is "loss aversion"; we tend to dislike losses a lot more than we like equivalent gains. That's why advertisers might claim "you can't afford not to" buy their product. Inertia is a powerful force, and companies exploit "status quo bias" by automatically subscribing you to something in the knowledge that even if it's possible to opt out, many won't bother.
So, manipulation is all around us, and rarely punished. But if we aim to create a right not to be manipulated, we will have to specify what we are talking about. A moral right can define manipulation broadly. A legal right should focus on the worst cases – the most egregious forms of trickery, those that are hardest to justify and that are most likely to impose real harm.
[...] The underlying principle should be one of personal autonomy, which means that hidden fees and costs should be banned too. We know that rules designed to bring those fees and costs into the open can do a great deal of good. A couple of recent examples from the US: in 2024, the Department of Transportation created a rule that requires airlines and ticket agents to disclose charges for checked baggage, carry-on baggage, changing or cancelling a reservation and so on up front.
[...] But consumer protection is only the start. In 1890, two lawyers, Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis, proposed a new right: the right to privacy. [...]
The right not to be manipulated now is a lot like the right to privacy back in 1890. At this stage, we cannot identify the full scope, and the appropriate limits, of that new right. The protection of consumers and investors is urgent. How it might apply to politics is a more delicate matter, and lawmakers will need to tread cautiously there.
One thing is clear, though: manipulation is a threat to our autonomy, our freedom and our wellbeing. We ought to be taking steps to fight back.
What specific laws does your country have protecting consumers?
(Score: 5, Informative) by bzipitidoo on Thursday July 31 2025, @08:48PM (1 child)
Like obscenity, manipulation can be hard to define. Yet we can agree that some practices are indeed manipulative and unfair. One such is making it a lot harder to quit than to join, or just making it unreasonably hard to quit. That particular one even has a term: roach motel. There's also an umbrella term: dark pattern.
Any more, to me, when a business tries to be a roach motel, it's a giant red flag that their offerings are not worth what they ask. And they know that. There is the famous recording of the man who tried to quit AOL, and the rep kept trying to steer him towards continuing. Wouldn't take "no" for an answer. The customer ended up screaming "cancel my service" at the rep, over and over. I too have had problems with ISPs refusing to let me go. There was a period when it seemed just about all ISPs were doing "roach moteling". Have disputed a local ISP's charges on my credit card. Have blown off Prodigy's scary and insulting letters telling me I am way, WAY behind on my dues, and what a low down, dirty so-and-so deadbeat I am for letting my account get into such a state, and they're going to take legal action if I don't pay up. Have told debt collectors to never call me again, which is not easy because the moment they sense you're about to tell them that, some very quickly hang up so they can claim you never said they couldn't call you again.
When the fad of automatic renewal caught on with print magazines, and I'd had a few fights with the local newspaper and several magazine publications I would have thought too respectable to try such desperate tactics, I finally responded by going nuclear. Canceled them ALL. That's been about 20 years ago now. Haven't subscribed to any of them since. Not even an online subscription.
More recently, I've had "roach moteling" from these cord blood banks. The whole thing was scammy from the get-go, and while they didn't fool me, they did scare the family into going for it. I waited a couple of years for the family to forget about it, then tried to quit. They wouldn't let me quit. So I just stopped paying. A year later, I got a nasty letter from a debt collector asserting that I owe hundreds of dollars. I didn't respond, and I have heard nothing further.
Medical in the US is just horrible. Charge 10x as much for a consumer good with the only difference being that it has been rebranded as "medical". A trick so common that Biden mentioned it in a speech is the out-of-network anesthesiologist. You think you're covered because your doctor is in-network. But the doc deliberately picks an anesthesiologist who is not in-network, they try to bill your insurer their fantasy list price that can be 20x or more the insured rate, the insurer refuses to pay that, so then they hound you for that money. I ignored that bill too, and suffered no consequences. A new trick that has become all too common is to construe the slightest bit of treatment of the slightest of physical issues, such as a tiny splinter or a little cut, as "surgery". $170 to remove a splinter. I gave the pediatrician hell for that stunt.
But where medical got me was the long term care. If you dispute something, they may take it off that month's bill, but they'll just put it back on the next month, and the month after that, and on and on, until they catch you napping and collect.
Couple of other minor things: never take a car to a tire store for inspection. They will tell you that worn but still good tires must be replaced. In places where gas stations only offer "full service", never tell them "fill 'er up!" They will overfill, spill gas down the side of your car and on the ground, to "make it come out even". You get to pay for that gas they just wasted. Not good for the paint job either, to say nothing of the environment.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 01 2025, @02:35PM
> That particular one even has a term: roach motel.
Nice, same concept as the Eagles song "Hotel California"-lyrics end with,
"Relax," said the night man, "We are programmed to receive
You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave"
> ...never take a car to a tire store for inspection. They will tell you that worn but still good tires must be replaced.
Counter example: I took my mother's car to the dealer for annual inspection and they told me the tires were dry rotted (after 5 years, very low miles) and wouldn't pass inspection. I left and took the car to a tire store and they said the tires did have a little checking on the sidewalls (this is what I saw), and they passed the tires through inspection with no problem. Same tire store continued to pass the car for several more years. At that point the tires really were worn out and I replaced them before going for the annual inspection.
I don't go to the dealer that sold the car anymore (another dealer sells the same brand, for dealer-only stuff I now go there).