Dark Patterns, the Ratchet
jacquesmattheij.com
jacquesmattheij.com
And I realized I had been subconsciously calling this "real" opt-out precisely because what I encounter in life as "opt-out" does not match that description.. "Real opt-out" is distressingly rare. Almost everything I encounter in real life is the style of ratchet described in this article, to the point where my brain without consulting me decided I needed a new word/phrase for what we were doing.
I feel like every mode dialog needs a "f--- off" response. When YouTube asks me every fifteen minutes if I'd like to try YouTube TV, my answer isn't "no thanks", a polite declination of this generous offer. It's "f--- off", you incessant greedy tools.
OS X isn't much better.
iOS is terrible in this regard, however. I've only managed to keep my phone on iOS 9 through a bug/workaround involving a tvOS beta cert.
I was one mistaken tap away from accidentally upgrading to iOS 10 and losing access to my phone for the next hour or however long it took.
They finally got me. I'm on iOS 10 now. It's ok. One great feature is that the insistent iOS 11 upgrade dialog requires a passcode to actually do the upgrade, so it's very easy to avoid triggering it accidentally. It still pops up randomly though.
Yet Firefox CONSTANTLY nags me to upgrade, and there's not even a "don't bug me for X amount of time" option.
I'd also add All-in-One-Gestures, Classic Theme Restorer to your list ;)
It will be interesting to see where the GDPR goes, especially with regards to surveillance companies we don't directly interact with. But as long as we continue to do things like utilize a specific retailer's software for researching and planning purchases, the incentives are for that retailer to design that software to push us into funneling as much business (and extraneous personal data!) as possible to themselves.
The way I see it, UI was solved somewhen in the 70s. Since then, we're only redoing the same building blocks with more or less glitter, and composing them in the same usual ways.
The problem is, really, that user-hostile interfaces are designed on purpose, to trick users.
One of the original ideas of the "semantic web" was that the entities that provide data and the entities that display the data should be decoupled and freely combinable by the user.
That idea didn't gain particularly large support with website developers.
I wonder why... /s
It already rubs me the wrong way when Google scrapes content from sites. I'm not surprised the dream failed if that's what it was.
Honest question: does Google AMP [1] fit this mold?
Every time my Facebook messenger app updates it asks me to confirm my phone number (which it already has through some other method). It employs multiple dark patterns to trick me into confirming, and because of this I’ve very nearly done so by accident.
This stuff might be profitable in the short term but many of us see through it — especially the younger generations — and it’s eroding any trust you may still have with people.
Companies need to cut this shit out ASAP if they want to be trusted in the future.
You might think this is a bit crazy, and you'd be correct, but it's nowhere near as crazy as thousands of things in the actual reality of our current legal system (banks crashing the global financial system, yet no one was guilty of anything, black men being executed at point blank range and the cop walking away, etc etc etc etc etc).
Don't propagate the false "planned obsolescence" meme. It's tired and counter-productive, especially from a security standpoint.
Please don't apologise for poor treatment of customers on behalf of Apple. Remember the way they drove updates to iOS7, by essentially breaking all apps in the app store that weren't iOS7 friendly? Remember all the performance problems as otherwise perfectly serviceable older devices were updated to newer OSes they couldn't properly support? Remember how Apple provides no easy mechanism for downgrading again if an OS (or app) update does impair or outright break your device, nor any way to turn off the nags if it thinks you should upgrade even though all the reviews and real world anecdotes are saying the new version is a disaster?
Speaking of wives, mine has the same slowdowns as me. It happens on our iPads too. We like being on the same OS version so we have the same features and emojis and such. We have to let each other know when one of us gets tricked again into updating so the other can too. It’s a source of much frustration for us.
Whether it’s nefarious overtly planned obsolescence or just the “accidental” lazy kind where they put less effort into supporting older hardware, the effect is the same and it sucks.
I should get to choose to upgrade. Period.
General
Storage
iOS update version $Whatever
delete
Yes
It won't ask again until apple releases another update. Do the same then. Changes the annoyance from a daily to an apple-release-ly.
But asking over and over until I say yes, then never asking again is just as nefarious my aforementioned election strategy.
Imagine this was a person-to-person thing. Person A wants person B to consent to something person B does not want to consent to. And let's not beat around the bush here: we're all thinking of something sexual right now. A repeatedly asks B, and no matter how many times B says no, A claims that B said "maybe later". B does not get to say "fuck off" unless B somehow quits A altogether.
Now that is messed up enough already, but what these forms do is give you no other option than answer "maybe later". That's a level above putting words in someone's mouth that I am sure would be considered a form of violation if someone in a position of power could do that to someone else.
And that very much applies here: I don't get to create the pop-ups in an app or on a website, so the app-makers are abusing a position of power here.
European Union has a tendency to do this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Referendums_related_to_the_Eur...
A treaty gets rejected, renegotiated, the public is informed of the changes, and then is voted on again. For example, per your own linked article:
> Denmark — The Danish Maastricht Treaty referendum, 1992, 2 June 1992, 50.7% against, turnout 83.1%
> Denmark — The Danish Maastricht Treaty referendum, 1993, 18 May 1993, 56.7% in favour, turnout 86.5%
> In Denmark, two referendums were held before the treaty of Maastricht passed. The first one rejected the treaty. After the defeat of the treaty in the first refererendum, Denmark negotiated and received four opt-outs from portions of the treaty: Economic and Monetary Union, Union Citizenship, Justice and Home Affairs, and Common Defence. The second referendum approved the treaty amended with the opt-outs.
That is how politics is supposed to work: debate and negotiate until a consensus is reached, and even then keep updating the rules as things change.
This is not a "vote until you answer what we want you to answer." Sure, there is an agenda by the diplomats to integrate Europe into one transnational union. But they're open about that, and the public does get to vote on big decisions through these referenda. The process through which all of this happens is a lot more democratic than, say, a big corporations pushing political parties to push a law through (and yes, that also happens in the EU, but that's a problem in political systems everywhere).
The other place I noticed it recently was Reddit's mobile website, which asks me to download the app TWICE every time I reopen it on my phone. The first prompt is a bottom banner taking up about 40% of the screen on my phone with the small link to the mobile site situated uncomfortably close to the much larger button which takes you to the app store. The second is a popup from clicking on a link, which takes up about 60% of the screen and is centered. It's workable, but it's almost as annoying, persistent, and anti-user as Facebook messenger on mobile web browsers.
It's infuriating seeing some of your favorite products try to pull this on you. I wish I could tell the developers to stop being assholes to their faces.
Browsing websites with a companion app always prompts you to view in the app or install the app, and the presentation is always biased toward doing so instead of declining. I wish there was an option to indicate that you don't want to be prompted in this fashion in the future - either all around, or to have it remember specific apps that you don't want to install.
It really is a persistent annoyance. The Reddit website in full desktop mode has also recently been pestering users about logging in, and it does so every time you navigate to the site if you aren't already logged in to an existing account.
It is really quite annoying, and has actively caused me to use the site less. I'm much less likely to use a timesink or unfocused browsing activity if I'm being pestered while doing so. I imagine that this type of activity is a significant portion of the whole for such websites, so it really seems disingenuous, unless their long-term plan is to pull a Facebook and focus on revenue through selling user data to third parties (which I imagine is most likely the case).
Not now should be "Not now and Never".
They don't stop doing the thing you told their UI to stop doing they 'pause' it.
GDPR is going to be great.
Does GDPR explicitly prohibit the use of these patterns? Or will it spawn more of them to trick you into accidentally opting in?
>The data subject shall have the right to withdraw his or her consent at any time. The withdrawal of consent shall not affect the lawfulness of processing based on consent before its withdrawal. Prior to giving consent, the data subject shall be informed thereof. It shall be as easy to withdraw as to give consent.
As I read it, if you're going to annoy your no-consent-given-(yet)-users with a "convenient" popup every time asking whether they consent... Then you also have to annoy your consent-already-given-users with an equally "convenient" popup every time asking whether they still consent. Break the anti-pattern by forcing the developers to pull it all the way through.
At any rate, it gets rid of the "Aha! given at last! now you can never revoke it!"-part of the ratchet.
[0] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELE... (page 37)
This means that it's pointless for them to show their custom prompt if you've already refused access, because even if you agree, they can't get the system prompt to show up again. So you can probably make the repeated prompts disappear by either a) agreeing to their custom prompt then refusing access when the system prompt appears, or b) going to Settings > Revolut and refusing access to your contacts there. The latter is probably the best way of doing it.
I wonder if they actually catch this case, or just say "if no access, show prompt"? It wouldn't shock me to find out that many apps are so ill-designed that refusing at the iOS screen simply creates a permanent popup with no actual use.
No. I have seen this defeated on a few apps-- they harass you with the custom messages, and when it realizes it can't trigger the system prompt, it just tells you to go into settings and approve it manually. Failure to follow through means the custom messages will continue harassing you as long as the permission has not been granted.
Don't think there is an option: Never share my contacts and stop bugging me about this option.
It used to be that the GWR train Wifi would automatically log me in. But now that has changed, and it takes me to a pre-populated log-in screen, which requires me to untick the "Add me to the mailing list" button, and tick the "T&Cs" and "Privacy statement" buttons.
I suspect that this is a GDPR hoop to show they have consent for every bit of data they use. But all I have to do is forget to untick the "Add me to your mailing list" button once...
Like the article says, there might be a way, somewhere deeply hidden in the website to revoke the consent, but do you really want to spend half an hour for that (if the button really, exists, and if it actually does anything)
A non-functional link is also a GDPR violation.
That said, I agree in general: it's a burden on me to make these websites respect my rights, and that's kinda bullshit. I either have to go through the hoops the site sets up, or I have to go through the bureaucratic hoops of the organization that judges the hoopiness of the website's hoops. But if I do care enough, there is now a stick to wield, which is an improvement.
"It shall be as easy to withdraw as to give consent."
Article 4.11: ”'consent' of the data subject means any freely given, specific, informed and unambiguous indication of the data subject's wishes by which he or she, by a statement or by a clear affirmative action, signifies agreement to the processing of personal data relating to him or her”
So there should be little need for mandatory boxes.
Using the GDPR to go after one big player that seriously screwed up is one thing. I certainly wouldn't be comfortable if I held Facebook stock right now.
But going after all the big players, just for not complying with something that is probably impractical for any of them to comply with, is something else entirely. How long do you think public sentiment is going to support government regulators and the GDPR if the likes of Facebook, Google Mail, WhatsApp, Instagram and SnapChat all go dark across the EU for an hour, or a day, or a week?
There's nothing unreasonable about it, it's the plain reading of Article 7 (2).
Regarding the big sites, I don't see how is that relevant to your initial point about whether "every site" will have mandatory checkboxes, and so I'll let someone else read the magic 8 ball.
>Of course it would be trivial to have a log of recently given permissions and an ‘undo’ option for each of those.
No, that's not trivial. It's not hard, but it's pretty far from trivial. Trivial would be removing the "not now" functionality from this question.
Maintaining a list of permissions and implementing the ability to undo them from a common area doesn't sound trivial at all to me, even if that only meant "no permission in the future".
If you were designing the app from the ground up to support that, it'd be a lot easier. But it still wouldn't be "trivial".
I went to go find the definition of "trivial", but I didn't get what I expected, and I'm sure it isn't what the author meant, either. "of little value or importance."
I was looking for something along the lines of "taking a negligible amount of effort". And I don't think implementing an entire interface and storing a list of data for it is trivial, let alone the part where you can take actions from that interface that potentially have system-wide ramifications.
And of course "trivial" is related to "obvious" when used in a math lecture.
In mobile, no such luxury, so instead always use the web app version unless unavoidable, like whatsapp.
https://hackernoon.com/deception-degenerate-a-b-testing-ecce...
Note: I am the author.
It would keep asking the user every time they visited their page.
Working to protect consumers by preventing anticompetitive, deceptive, and unfair business practices, enhancing informed consumer choice and public understanding of the competitive process, and accomplishing this without unduly burdening legitimate business activity.