Terms and Conditions Game
termsandconditions.game
termsandconditions.game
People who take a lot of multiple-choice tests have learned all the tricks, and can probably get 100%.
BTW, Evil Corp did not fool me:
We attempted to access your data 29 times
Unfortunately, we were unable to access any of it.
That's better than 99% of players
You took 424.41 seconds to complete the game
That's faster than 10% of players
You did particularly well with speedy questions
I’m not sure to be proud of this, or to be ashamed of the state of the world which has trained me to do this well.
SPOILERS
(answers in rot-13)
1. N 2. O 3. P 4. Q 5. N 6. O 7. P 8. Q
> That's faster than 10% of players
This metric is useless without quantifying it. Is he faster than 10% of players who also kept their data unaccessible (only this metric is useful), or is that compared to all players (this isn't useful)? Also, hope "players" is really players and not games played.
The funny thing is, when you click it (top left corner), you get to The Guardian web page that asks whether you want to accept cookies.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/may/17/can-you-solv...
This has more than tripled the amount of time it takes to read an answer from stack overflow but I refuse to do something just because of a bad GUI.
I'm still baffled at the way this was rolled out. Why are we putting the requirement on website authors, and not browser vendors? There's a lot fewer of those to regulate.
Because the website authors are the ones misbehaving. Why would the browser vendors pay the price?
I'm in complete support for punishing any abuse of market position from the browser vendors too, but that's not the answer you seek. Anyway, the correct course of action is to punish the website authors further for using those anti-patterns.
This one got me pretty good.
That, or I was just lucky.
1. not clicking Yes -> clicking No
2. avoid clicking No -> click Yes
3. To opt out of opting in -> To opt out of
=> To opt out of receiving alerts click Yes.
"to opt out of opting in" -> ok so just "to opt out"
avoid not clicking yes -> double negative so "click yes"
the dependent logic statements like "none of the above are true" on the other hand..
The way I read it, a timer expiration on that one would have opted you in
A) It's a satire game, so the rules of the game may not perfectly align with the laws of the EU.
B) I'm not from the EU, so who knows, that shit might be just fine in my jurisdiction. We'd have to put it in front of a judge to find out. I'm guessing it wouldn't fly, but I've seen the United States Courts come to stupider conclusions.
I’m not sure whether you’re being serious about this or not. But I’ve come across distressingly many cases where they’ll expire your session (and probably without telling you) long before you’d have time to actually read the full T&Cs they require you to theoretically accept.
"By using this website, you agree..." How can I read their silly terms of conditions if I must use their website in order to even obtain a copy?
The truth is these people are going to do whatever they want regardless of how anyone feels about it and they won't care until they get fined out of existence.
I say “theoretically” because most jurisdictions have steadily headed in the direction of ignoring consumer-grade terms of service and EULAs, to the point of only considering terms that a reasonable person would expect to find there to be enforceable, since culturally it’s reached the point where it’s understood that no one reads them.
I assume if the user chooses “strictly necessary cookies”, SO saves as little data as possible, and they decide to not save that choice.
Obviously the UX is terrible for the user concerned about privacy.
One option that for now still works is to hide the popup with an external tool like uBlock Origin.
This feels like malicious compliance. Storing an "Opt out: Yes" cookie is clearly not personal data requiring consent, but not storing it makes the opt out experience more frustrating than opt in which I suspect is the real point.
Why can't they just do that?
Bit of background:
Every website now greats you with a plethora of pop-ups; Cookie permission, GDPR consent, newsletters, notifications. We’re all becoming unwilling experts at quickly clicking the right clicks (and crossing our fingers we didn’t give away anything too important).
I thought it would be fun to try and make a game out of it.
Puzzles are inspired by (or outright stolen) from real dark patterns that companies are using right now.
I worked with puzzle writer Alex Bellos to help create the pop-up-puzzles. Three of the challenges are featured today in his Guardian column. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/may/17/can-you-solv...
Thanks darkpatterns.org, reddit.com/r/darkpatterns, webtransparency.cs.princeton.edu/dark-patterns/ and of course HN for all the inspiration!
Also a shout out to plausible.io which I used for web analytics since we couldn’t really have a cookie consent banner on our own site.
A number of buttons and a somewhat complicated description that says that any of the shown buttons would decline the terms but the innocuous close button in the corner of the dialog would accept them. This might catch people who think to have found a shortcut in this close button over having to actually decide which button might be the correct one.
Either others are fast or I am slow or people who quit early contribute to the duration stats. (Or some combination).
Fun game!
Maybe this has all happened before.
11: To opt out of opting in to receive marketing alerts avoid not clicking Yes
14: Select the next square in the sequence
20: We would like to send you notifications. Do you disagree to receiving them?
25: (I still can't get this one!)
Select the one truthful statement to opt out of cookies.
All the statements below are true.
None of the statements below are true.
None of the statements above are true.
Thanks for visiting Evil Corp We attempted to access your data 29 times and you were kind enough to give it to us 4 times. That's better than 73% of players You took 351.52 seconds to complete the game That's faster than 23% of players You did particularly well with speedy questions Thanks for playing Terms And Conditions Apply Please share with friends so we can extract their data* *Disclaimer: Game does not extract real data
It's the third option for question 25! You know there can only be one answer right and the only answer that leaves just one possibility is the third one.
It also seems you have a hard time responding to inverted questions. Just like in logic I try to invert the meaning. If you invert the meaning of the sentence, you also want to invert the answer. Let's say we inverted disagree into agree in question 20. The question would then become: Do you agree to receiving them?
The answer would be no. If you then invert the question back the answer would be yes.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/01/21/opinion/priva...
Not sure if any real site actually writes so.
> Answer very, very carefully. Do you agree to the terms & conditions?
I think you want to click "No", but it's telling me that the correct answer is to click "Yes".
I LOLed at several points, including the “pick the next square in the sequence” and the checkbox mini-game.
If you're asking the truthful assistant, then it'll correctly tell you that the other assistant will point at the wrong answer.
If you're asking the untruthful assistant, it'll lie and say that the other assistant will point at the wrong answer.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/may/17/did-you-solv...
Eventually you have all but one boxes checked. Tap the empty box and the checks will clear.
Caveat:
Works if the number of starting ticks is even.
Proof:
Tapping does not change the state of the tapped checkbox, but flips all others.
There are only two states (ticked / unticked) => If a checkbox is flipped an even number of times, its final state is the same as its initial state. And if a checkbox is flipped an odd number of times, it's final state is the opposite of its initial state.
There are an even number of starting ticks (n = 4). So by tapping all starting ticked positions, we are flipping the rest an even number of times (n), and the starting ticked positions an odd number of times (n - 1).
I wish there was a browser extension or other automation that could decline/minimally configure these things correctly. Fight scale with scale, you know?
Click No. Not all buttons are styled as buttons!