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> I have been working as a ux consultant for 15 years now

> ...

> I am actually not very sure what we see here, is it a dark pattern?

It sounds like you've been in the grey/black side of the UX industry for too long, and have become a bit institutionalised.

eg You're not see things clearly.

If possible, maybe take a break from the UX space for a year or so, and do something else? Might help to regain your sense of things. :)

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I'm not an UX consultant and what justinclift said makes sense. Maybe the downgrading process could be a bit more streamlined, but, since you're dealing with data, erring on the side of caution does not seem too bad of a strategy.

I’m not defending Dropbox, some parts of this are definitely dark patterns, but I worked for one startup that had decorated their hallways with messages from people who had erroneously deleted their own accounts and data. To do that they had to click 3 times. In the beginning you just had to click “yes” 3 times, we changed it to delete and did the same thing as Dropbox using the other UX color so people would not just click but read and think. Dropbox is used in situations where I could easily imagine scores of user keeping valuable data on it and forgetting about his data, forcing them through a process seems prudent.

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