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Comment by chrisacky | Hacker News Reader

I signed up for a new account on a fitness website yesterday. They track health and food and diet you enter. anyway, during the sign up they had a opt out, I chose to do just that, however the opt out process then took over the screen with a modal window, which gave a loading bar and took about thirty seconds to complete... But guess what... There was a big CANCEL button. I couldn't perform any action during sign up and opt out.

This was one of the worst dark patterns I've seen. PS. The app was MyFitnessPal which i registered on recommendation but that felt so shady.

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There's a Germany-based competitor to myfitnesspal called Yazio that has a good privacy policy. Don't know if their database of nutritional information is as good in your location though.

In fairness, when I went to that site as an experiment, it did eventually appear to save my preferences. And in more fairness, go look at the list of cookies and especially under advertising. Yeah, that's a lot fucking bigger than it should be, and a minority allow opting out. But imagine the implementation in your head: you've probably got to make some web call (REST, WebSocket, whatever) for each one of those.

In summary, I could see how that might take a minute or two without a requirement for evil.

I use "LoseIt" since MFP went overboard with having features and not a single UI/UX review.

It really is impressive how many taps it takes me to do anything in MFP. Why are there so many damn menus, I just want to input calories and see a counter. It is so overly complex I just switched back to a legal pad and doing the math by hand, it is faster.

for apps like this why does anyone sign up with their real name, email, and/or demographic info? get a throwaway email and there you go.

i can't remember the last time i used my real info or email.

although there was a case just last week where a site "needed" my phone number. in 2 seconds flat i decided i didn't need that service.

of course without a legit email you can't, or it's much++ harder for account recovery, but i can live with that.

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