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#darkpatterns

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@lolgop I support this idea and I will probably sign the petition (I’m a TM customer. Still mulling over whether I want to support Verizon or AT&T instead).

I support #TeslaTakedown and participated in one of their protests. But look at how scummy this petition is.

First I notice that they inform me that I “may receive” email from a bunch of groups. That’s weird because it implies uncertainty.

Then I notice this microscopic, grey-on-grey text that says “edit subscription preferences”. I haven’t signed in to this site, so how do I even have any preferences to edit? I tap it and it expands to an already-opted-in list of ELEVEN different orgs who will all feel entitled to spam me because they will point to this as the time I affirmatively opted in to receive all their emails.

How many petition signers even see that, much less click it? This is a #DarkPattern and this is really slimy. The ONLY way to be slimier would be to opt me in without even telling me.

The word “preferences” is plural, implying I have more than one preference. In practice my choice is to accept email from all 11 or none. It’s a single preference, hidden from view as much as possible.

Continued thread

I managed to get a video of this dark pattern. 12 seconds in you can finally see the faint "skip" button pop in. First I have to click the 'What's happening under the hood?" link. Then I have to leave the explanation on the screen for a while, then skip appears.

Here's a nice #darkpattern from #AmazonQDeveloper. Installing it on my #debian laptop and it pops up this GUI. Now, grey text on white background is a completely pedestrian dark pattern.

The thing that is new for me, that isn't obvious from a single screenshot, is that the "skip" grey text doesn't appear at all for like 10-20 seconds. When you first see this dialog box, there's no 'skip' button. This might lead you to believe it isn't possible to skip. I tend to read things that pop up. And so while I was reading the skip button appeared.

Thanks #darkpatterns

Tried to delete my Airbnb account. Saw a "Deactivate" button and thought - wow, guess I was wrong about corporations going out of their way to hold on to their property (your data).

But nope, turns out deletion is a separate process.

Airbnb: "Just contact support to reactivate."
Support: "Please login."
Support: "Sorry, you can’t login, this account is deactivated." 🤷‍♂️

Love a good dark pattern.

Regulator and lawmakers around the world are finally targeting organisations that use #darkpatterns to manipulate consumers into using products or services.

Chandni Gupta, Deputy CEO of the Consumer Policy Research Centre (and friend of EFA) has wrapped up some fantastic research on this issue. Chandni met with scores of regulators, enforcement agencies, consumer advocacy groups and choice architecture experts in the US, UK, Singapore and India about dark patterns and how they regulate them.

Case in point is Amazon's Project Iliad, a process designed to make it harder for customers to cancel their Prime membership. How? By making the process so needlessly complex that many users would give up and abandon the form.

Chandni writes that Australia is falling behind on protecting citizens from dark patterns. Legislating consumer potections against dark patterns is vital to protect us from manipulation of our behaviour and choices online.

Read the CPRC report: cprc.org.au/report/made-to-man

New #wjds paper published:

Author Xin Ye explores how online platforms use manipulative, attention-grabbing tactics that undermine user autonomy. Current #EU laws fall short - this study offers 3 key policy fixes.

Read more: doi.org/10.34669/wi.wjds/5.3.2

The paper is part of a special issue on "Well-being in the Digital World"

@dougaparry #DarkPatterns #AddictiveDesign #TechEthics #DigitalRights #PlatformRegulation #GDPR #DSA #research #law #socialscience #computerscience

How I hate Microsoft's #DarkPatterns.

Now, if you make the mistake of opening an attachment in Outlook 365, there is absolutely no way to download/save it. You can print it, but there's very little other functionality left. You have to come out of the attachment and use the down arrow on the item in the email to find Download in the menu. The copy of the item now shown at the top of the email chain has no such link and just opens the viewer.

Clarification:

If the "attachment" is a OneDrive cloud document, there is a Download link in the viewer.

If the document is an actual attachment, I only get the deeply unwanted Save to OneDrive option.

In other words, Microsoft's sole aim is to get all my documents under whatever rummaging rights they reserve for OneDrive.

Wer auf seinem Smart-TV die #AmazonPrime App öffnet, weil man einen gekauften Film schauen will, und dann eine Werbe-Einblendung für den Abschluss einer Prime-Mitgliedschaft sieht, sollte aufpassen.

Jedweder Klick auf diesem Bildschirm mit der Fernbedienung führt zum Abschluss der Prime-Mitgliedschaft - selbst wenn es ein Klick auf den Text "Ohne Prime-Mitgliedschaft weitermachen" ist, neben dem das Symbol der Zurück-Taste prangt. #DarkPatterns #Enshittification #Täuschung

I bought some hard drives from #Newegg yesterday and once again fell into the trap of forgetting to uncheck the subscribe checkbox they check by default and starting to get #spam from them within minutes of checking out.
No more! Now #Tampermonkey will uncheck the box for me:
blog.kamens.us/2025/02/11/tamp
@didathingclub #DidAThingClub #DarkPatterns

Something better to do · Tampermonkey script: no, Newegg, I don’t freakin’ want to subscribe
More from jik

Here's an idea.
So, we all know all the tech companies are cramming their shit full of dark patterns.

One I saw recently was instagram blocking mass unfollowing.

Could there be people out there who could provide simple how-to's on browser automation, to let people make their own bots to thwart that sort of pattern when they see it?

E.g. to do an unfollow every sixty seconds or whatever else is slow enough to dodge the block.

It’s funny to me that #bigtech companies are competing to show off how smart their various #AI models are, but that fancy tech never somehow trickles down to #customerservice where long wait times, byzantine phone trees, incomplete knowledge base search mazes, and other time wasters are the norm.

RN on hold waiting to chat w/ @Microsoft support for 27 minutes while it helps 43 ppl. Really? #CoPilot can’t take a crack at helping me?