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Could that be because you're a good developer and not a shady shit working for Facebook? It's not really a new term. There's even been a website around that publishes a continuously rolling hall of shame for the past 10 years: https://darkpatterns.org/

One can't be expected to know every term used in every field, or even in one field. For being called "hip" this website has been around for nearly a decade calling out and shaming shady practices: https://darkpatterns.org/

I suppose if I bought a domain name (like https://darkpatterns.org/) I'd try to make everyone feel like a dweeb for not standardizing on my trademark.

Wait! Could this be some kind of trick?

Or you could, you know... use terminology in the standard way it has come to be used throughout the industry.

"...data harvesting and sharing by mobile apps was now 'out of control'..."

No, apps are not "out of control". A society that gladly accepts this shit is the one out of control. Ignorance has practically begged for the destruction of privacy.

To the society that has welcomed an Orwellian future, don't bother asking what year it is anymore. It's 1984. It's always going to be 1984, because that's what you want.

Let's stop blaming the victims here, please. There are very powerful forces using... very powerful forces the mainstream adults are only recently starting to become aware of.

Even as people are seeing proof of just how deep in the quicksand they are, their toys are Trojan horses that came at a price of Addiction and Network effects. Even as rational as they might be, escaping is similar to companies that spend millions of dollars and still fail to permanently escape Oracle-like vendor lock-in. The tendency to knowingly continue in the path of least resistance towards destructive dead-ends is one problem. Another is that... there is NO alternative. Every single non-Google, non-Apple phone out there is failing or found to have some weird spyware or breach-like gotcha, except for the dumb ones. We can't trust the firmware even on those phones, because the laws are build to prevent abuse of spectrum by locking the public out of just Bringing Their Own, and fabricating our own open source hardware is also discouraged by the big powers and impractical. A chip fab can cost millions of dollars just to get started --it's not like you can just 3d print your own silicon at home and design your own own social networks running on your own apps and somehow get all your friends out of the network effect in their own personal Lotus Eater traps even if you managed to escape yours.

In a single word, the problem is: "Greed." Not "Vassals"

There's even a name for it -- "Dark UI Patterns"

http://darkpatterns.org/ is an entire website about them.

This buy wants to fight it at the designer level, but seems to be a dead end. As no one is listening http://darkpatterns.org/

This is a dark pattern which is a user interface designed to trick people into doing things.

Yep, and there's that whole whole "engagement" concept that is now baked into games to keep you clicking. A little work, a little reward, but then it goes into times cycles, contingent rewards, goal-teasing, etc etc etc. Zinga hired teams of psychologists to make their games (in their own words) "as addicting as possible". And it's worked.

Farmville, Candy Crush, etc etc etc...practically all now use this timed-reward technique along with other motivational "pokes" to keep you glued to the game or at least checking in hourly/daily/whatever.

It's just one reason I don't play games on my ipad...it's ALL just a suck-job to get you to lock up your free time and interest in the hopes of getting you to spend money.

This is a dark pattern which is a user interface designed to trick people into doing things.

I'm surprised how many Slashdotters have replied "he ought to keep closer control of what his kid is doing" and "Apple isn't at fault, they just created the system". Apple is responsible for the user interface and just because the user "could have navigated the user interface" and not had his kid buy the in-app purchases doesn't mean that Apple isn't responsible. "You could have figured out the bad user interface" is never an excuse, especially when the bad user interface is on purpose.

If you take away the internet, your computer becomes significantly worse than it was.

There's plenty I can do with my PC while it is disconnected from the Internet. Because I have no Internet connection while commuting to and from work on public transit, I typically carry about three hours of programming work on my laptop that can be done without connection to the Internet. Or I might download a bunch of pages from Cracked and open them in Firefox tabs to read on the bus. Or I might download an entire page of Slashdot comments, compose replies while offline, and post them the next time I connect. (I did just that for most of this very comment.)

Once you stop needing computing cycles locally, why would you upgrade your system (you being anyone/company/institution)?

In the era of computing on someone else's server, desktop CPUs remain important for at least three reasons. First, desktop and server PCs use CPUs of the same or similar microarchitecture. Better CPUs means each server can handle more load. Second, not everybody wants to blow their entire 5 GB/mo cap on bouncing things off someone else's server. Third, using someone else's server means you're subject to the privacy (or lack thereof) policy of the server operator and whatever other anti-user "dark patterns" are implemented in the non-free software running on that server.