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Comment by mhitza | Hacker News Reader

Just the other day I've encountered a cookie modal, where the enabled option was grayed out and when disabled it was colored. Only noticed this because the required cookies toggle was obviously on (though gray in color). For someone in a hurry (like we are all when dismissing those modals), you would expect to gray those out, which would actually make you opt-in to all those advertising cookies. Talk about dark patterns.

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> Just the other day I've encountered a cookie modal, where the enabled option was grayed out and when disabled it was colored. Only noticed this because the required cookies toggle was obviously on (though gray in color). For someone in a hurry (like we are all when dismissing those modals), you would expect to gray those out, which would actually make you opt-in to all those advertising cookies. Talk about dark patterns.

I realized the same pattern but in reverse in my phone provider's app. When you're making a payment with your credit/debit card, there is a toggle that you can turn on for them to tokenize your card. By default, the toggle is to the left side and it's colored light blue. When you toggle it to the right it become gray. I believe they have done it on purpose to confuse prople who don't want their card tokenized.

Why would anyone not want it tokenized?

Also curious. The only thing I can imagine is wanting to call customer service and have them say “you paid your last bill with the CC ending in 1234” and knowing which of your card that is? Seems like a stretch.

I've previously assumed that the choice there is either:

a) don't save CC info at all

b) save CC info in tokenized form (whatever that means)

And since I never save CC info on websites (only in the phone wallet feature) I've always rejected these "tokenized" prompts. But it seems I need to research this thing more next time.

> I've previously assumed that the choice there is either:

> a) don't save CC info at all

> b) save CC info in tokenized form (whatever that means)

> And since I never save CC info on websites (only in the phone wallet feature) I've always rejected these "tokenized" prompts. But it seems I need to research this thing more next time.

Tokenization means that the payment processor saves your cc information for "easier" use when you make purchases/pay bills in the future. The seller/service provider can of course use that token to charge you anytime they want. I hope this helps with understanding how it works(and why I am hesitant to allow tokenization of my cards).

> the enabled option was grayed out and when disabled it was colored

In the old, default browser UI, buttons had black labels when enabled, and grey ones when disabled.

Then web designers started making button widgets that looked "cooler" than button elements. Then they realized that they could use the new "buttons" to make indicators as well; so they repurposed the enabled/disabled idiom to mean instead "on/off" or "yes/no". So now the idiom is ambiguous.

If you want a dual-purpose button/indicator, emulate those old keyboards that had an on/off neon in the CAPS-lock key. I prefer a separate indicator, but at least those old CAPS-locks were ergonomically unambiguous.

If I understand, bad (against user interest) defaults can be called a dark pattern, but shouldn't purposely misleading state indication also deserve the direct label: deceptive practice?

Do you remember what site that was on? I’d like to blog about that one.

Unfortunately no, although I'm sure it must have been some news website that popped up in /r/europe or /r/worldnews

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