If you are an Instagram user, you may have recently seen a pop-up asking if the service is “using your app and website activity to provide a better advertising experience”. There are two fields below: You can choose ‘Make your ads less personalized’ with a shade of black slightly darker than the background popup. Using the light blue square, you can choose to “customize your ads”.
This is just an example of what Recode writing
Calls, a design that manipulates or strongly influences users to make certain decisions. Instagram uses terms like “activity” and “custom” rather than “tracking” and “targeting”, so the user may not be aware of what the app is actually allowed to do.
Most people don’t want Instagram and their parent company, Facebook, to know everything about the other sites they visit, for example. But ‘Better Experience’ seems positive as well, which is why Instagram makes choosing what you want the user to like more clearly and attractively than the one you want to talk about.
Consumer protection could be undermined in the Biden administration
Increasingly, there are growing opinions about deliberately banning such dark, manipulative patterns, and it could also lead to changes in consumer protection laws and action against tools like the Biden administration’s technology policy and related initiatives. California is currently dealing with dark patterns in emerging privacy laws, and Washington’s most recent privacy law includes a clause on these patterns.
If we look at how websites use dark patterns for their “digital sharing,” usually the internet allows them to make certain elements more prominent and make others less visible to consumers. Understanding this is extremely important to us while developing our digital economy strategy.
– says Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, chair of the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC).
Dark patterns have fooled internet users for years to issue their data, money and time. If the politicians and organizers who speak out against them (or support these people) achieve their goals so that they can take effective action against them, they may not be able to continue to do so.
This is how they beat the dark patterns
Although you may not have heard the term dark patterns, you have come across countless examples that have caused alarm. Some of these are not actual “patterns” or gradients, they are only a method.
- Only at the end of the trial period will be automatically charged for the trial service you signed up for.
- In-app advertisement you can’t figure out how to exit it, because the “X” in the upper right corner is so small and dim that it cannot be seen …
- … or an “X” so small that she accidentally clicks on the ad itself and redirects it to the ad’s website.
- A website with a political nature has gone astray and is trying to convince you to register and push you hard in the face, if you say “no” then you should press, for example, “to allow me to deceive from now on.”
- If the previous trick can be called outright aggression, the “passive-aggressive” solution when subscribing to the website’s newsletter is that the “yes” button is a large, red, or bright color, while the “no” or unsubscribe button is much smaller and indicates Until someone who clicks on you is a “stupid” or “stupid” person who has no interest in saving money or staying informed.
- A marketing email instructing you to respond within the next five minutes or not, and triggers a fake countdown to user frustration and urges.
Online “ready deception display”
But there are also effects that may not be very apparent. Websites, for example, often use dark patterns in one way or another
Deceiving users,
To contribute to the follow-up or to use their data in a way that was not expected and desired. Either the sites claim to offer users the option to opt out of tracking (usually because they are required to do so by law), but are using misleading language, or they make it particularly difficult to actually enforce it. (There are a number of examples of this on Facebook.)
Examples are pop-ups for consenting cookies. Also under GDPR rules, websites warn you against using cookies and then ask you to “accept” them, usually by clicking on a large, prominent icon and in bright colors. But if you want to refuse cookies, you need to search for them and click on them in the settings menu and turn them off manually. Most people don’t have the time or the patience to go through this with every website they visit, or not many people really understand what they “get tired” of. Companies whose revenue is highly dependent on user data don’t want it easy for users to refuse to provide data.
It used to be, but now it’s been “manufactured”
Harry Brignole, an independent “user experience” expert living in the US coined the term “dark patterns” in 2010 and has been calling it his website ever since. There were similar gimmicks even before the advent of the internet, whether we meant commercial ploys, targeted advertising or political manipulation, or more or less aggressive or passive-aggressive convictions around the world. However, the internet has made black tricks smarter and more powerful. Websites can improve their techniques by using very specific feedback from visitors, improving their manipulation to an extent that the physical world will never “professionally” know.
I think the internet has facilitated manufacturing in the way we convince, manipulate, and deceive each other.
Brignol says.
Wild West is ready!
The fundamental problem with all of this is that in the absence of sufficiently accurate data protection laws (neither, nor the GDPR), it is difficult to define an enforceable practice or practice that can actually be sanctioned or prosecuted. Consumers have a hard time knowing what they want to sell them unintentionally, or how they can use the transfer of their data against them if it is all done behind the scenes.
It’s a bit like the unseen health damage from inhaling smoke or getting a radiation dose: when this happens to you, you may not notice it, but it has a subtle effect on you.
Brignol says.
It is very difficult to think about the harm caused by intruding into privacy and understand the long-term consequences this can have. While we constantly leak information about ourselves to data brokers, we don’t really realize how it’s being used.
The expert added.
For this reason, Brignull and more and more advocates, regulators and legislators feel that legislation is necessary to eradicate these dark patterns so that consumers can use the internet without constantly manipulating them to spend money and subscribe to services they don’t need or even provide their own data. Brignole is convinced that proper regulation can pay off.
The right laws can really transform the internet to make us feel good when we surf, rather than the whole “wild west” that exists now. We really need this now.
(Recode)
(Cover image: Shutterstock)
