Slashdot Mirror
Dark Patterns Across the Web Are Designed To Trick You
An anonymous reader writes from a report via Ars Technica: Harry Brignell has posted a 30-minute video documenting dark patterns, deliberately confusing or deceptive user interfaces (not exclusive to the internet) that trick users into setting up recurring payments, purchasing items added to a shopping cart, or spamming all contacts through pre-checked forms on Facebook games for example. Basically, they're tactics used by online services to get users to do things they wouldn't normally do. Yael Grauer has written an in-depth report on Ars Technica about dark patterns, where he discusses Brignull's work with UX designers and business executives: "Klein [Principal at Users Known and author of UX for Lean Startups] believes many of the worst dark patterns are pushed by businesses, not by designers. 'It's often pro-business at the expense of the users, and the designers often see themselves as the defender or advocate of the user,' she explained. And although Brignull has never been explicitly asked to design dark patterns himself, he said he has been in situations where using them would be an easy solution -- like when a client or boss says they really need a large list of people who have opted in to marketing e-mails. 'The first and easiest trick to have an opt-in is to have a pre-ticked checkbox, but then you can just get rid of that entirely and hide it in the terms of conditions and say that by registering you're going to be opted in to our e-mails,' Brignull said. 'Then you have a 100-percent sign-up rate and you've exceeded your goals. I kind of understand why people do it. If you're only thinking about the numbers and you're just trying to juice the stats, then it's not surprising in the slightest.' 'There's this logical positivist mindset that the only things that have value are those things that can be measured and can empirically be shown to be true, and while that has its merits it also takes us down a pretty dark place,' said digital product designer Cennydd Bowles, who is researching ethical design. 'We start to look at ethics as pure utilitarianism, whatever benefits the most people. Yikes, it has problems.'" Brignull's website has a number of examples of deliberately confusing or deceptive user interfaces.
I might watch that video if it weren't trying to trick me into wasting 30 minutes to see the 6 examples that are the actual content.
https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign
(APOLOGIES for being off topic but...[...])
APK
Oh, the irony.
The exquisite irony.
2. Bad actors exist and the internet allows them to hide things so that users select things they normally would not.
3. Bad actors are often inside of what most people consider "reputable" companies.
4. Morality is hard and the bad actors in charge of stuff tend to push for lots number 2 (I had to skip "1" for the irony).
You knew all this stuff already, or should have. We have a justice system which is supposed to handle companies breaching moral code, or what we call law. The problem is obviously how to make things visible to the user, which given the desires of HTML and JavaScript won't happen. setAttribute("type", "hidden"); has valid purposes as well as nefarious. Such is the nature of tools. I guess secondarily the punishment for bad actors may not fit the crime, but again we have a justice system for that.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
The idea came from the dark energy of dark matter.
And then I flushed it.
Table-ized A.I.
It is much easier to fix than most people think. Basically you just have to allow end users to choose to make undesirable sites disappear. Basically the user should be allowed to ban those sites from say search results or advertising. A reasonable end user choice, had a bad experience with the company, don't want to deal with them any more, fine lock them out from accessing your digital mind space, no search results, no ads. Of course certain companies would have to agree or be forced to agree to end user choices, sort a digital right to your own eyeballs to not see what you do not want to see, a right corporations seem desperate to take away, as in force you to see what they want to see whether or not you want to see it. A new kind of privacy, the private right to keep you mind free of interactions with shitty companies. Individually it does not count for much but those companies do not screw over individually, they screw over everyone the meet and hence those blocks over time have real bite and kill companies over time. There should be a right to individually block content, to not be forced to see it prior to shutting it down, to enable you to choose to never see it again, that should be a real profound right of choice for all of us.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Coined by Barnabas Collins, maybe?
The EFF bloggedabout deliberately misleading UI design over 6 years ago, going with the name 'Evil Interfaces.' My favorite alternate name was 'confuser interface design', by the way. 'Dark patterns' is so vague as to be useless.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
'There's this logical positivist mindset that the only things that have value are those things that can be measured and can empirically be shown to be true, and while that has its merits it also takes us down a pretty dark place,' said digital product designer Cennydd Bowles, who is researching ethical design. 'We start to look at ethics as pure utilitarianism, whatever benefits the most people. Yikes, it has problems.'
What the heck is this supposed to have to do with anything?? First off, logical positivism is an early to mid 20th-century philosophical movement that embraced the idea of verification as the basis of truth. There are all sorts of things we could say about this philosophical movement, but I have no clue what it could possibly have to do with "Dark Patterns" or immoral web design. There's no reason verificationism inevitably leads one to a "dark place," whatever that means.
Yet we then jump to this idea of utilitarianism, yet another philosophical term that seems out of place. Yes, the stereotype of extreme utilitarians is that they will justify all sorts of weird ethically questionable behavior "for the sake of the greater good," like the doctor who would kill the live healthy dude who wanders into the hospital if he could save five other dying people with the organs. Most utilitarians aren't that crazy.
But again, I'm not sure what this has to do with "dark patterns" or web design, because it's pretty clear that these things probably DON'T do "the greatest good for the most people" -- in fact, they are ways of stealing wealth from large amounts of stupid people (who probably don't have that much money to spare, on average) and concentrating it among a few people. That's actually pretty much the opposite of utilitarian reasoning.
And I still have no clue what utilitarianism (an ethical philosophy) has to do with logical positivism (which has to do with epistemology, or the basis of knowledge). It would be quite possible to subscribe to one and not the other, or neither, or whatever -- they simply have little to do with each other. I'm not sure how empirical verification of stuff to determine truth inevitably leads to a MORAL argument around utilitarianism (which isn't usually something "verifiable" in the normal scientific sense)... and neither of these seem to have anything to do with "evil" web design.
The only thing I can figure is that this person is some sort of anti-science religious nutjob who thinks that dependence on scientific reasoning leads to moral decay or something, and they're just using "utilitarian" as a code word for "bad moral system."
This is one of the most muddled things I've seen in a Slashdot summary recently (and that's saying something)... and this person is supposedly "researching" ethical web design?? I think you might want to learn English first or some basic logic before you start throwing around irrelevant philosophical terms.
Every. Single. Time. you enable GPS on your phone in Marshmallow, Google services prompts you to permanently allow Google to collect location data from your phone - this only goes away if you accept, it never goes away if you deny.
Apparently the only way to get rid of this without accepting, is to actually root your phone and use a custom xposed framework addon, explicitly for getting rid of that prompt.
Perfect example of a 'Dark Pattern' in a user interface.
Right after the a-with-a-hat(TM) bug?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."