FTC Study Finds 'Dark Patterns' Used By a Majority of Subscription Apps and Websites (techcrunch.com) 35
The U.S. FTC, along with two other international consumer protection networks, announced on Thursday the results of a study into the use of "dark patterns" -- or manipulative design techniques -- that can put users' privacy at risk or push them to buy products or services or take other actions they otherwise wouldn't have. TechCrunch: In an analysis of 642 websites and apps offering subscription services, the study found that the majority (nearly 76%) used at least one dark pattern and nearly 67% used more than one. Dark patterns refer to a range of design techniques that can subtly encourage users to take some sort of action or put their privacy at risk. They're particularly popular among subscription websites and apps and have been an area of focus for the FTC in previous years. For instance, the FTC sued dating app giant Match for fraudulent practices, which included making it difficult to cancel a subscription through its use of dark patterns.
[...] The new report published Thursday dives into the many types of dark patterns like sneaking, obstruction, nagging, forced action, social proof and others. Sneaking was among the most common dark patterns encountered in the study, referring to the inability to turn off the auto-renewal of subscriptions during the sign-up and purchase process. Eighty-one percent of sites and apps studied used this technique to ensure their subscriptions were renewed automatically. In 70% of cases, the subscription providers didn't provide information on how to cancel a subscription, and 67% failed to provide the date by which a consumer needed to cancel in order to not be charged again.
[...] The new report published Thursday dives into the many types of dark patterns like sneaking, obstruction, nagging, forced action, social proof and others. Sneaking was among the most common dark patterns encountered in the study, referring to the inability to turn off the auto-renewal of subscriptions during the sign-up and purchase process. Eighty-one percent of sites and apps studied used this technique to ensure their subscriptions were renewed automatically. In 70% of cases, the subscription providers didn't provide information on how to cancel a subscription, and 67% failed to provide the date by which a consumer needed to cancel in order to not be charged again.
So how many Slashdot members code this stuff? (Score:3)
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Are the consumers somehow to blame because they are stupid? It's all their fault for tolerating the behavior?
Yes? The funny thing with blame is that once there is someone to blame, all that is left is to "punish" the person who can be blamed. I mean sure, yeah, the person tricking you is bad, but we don't have to deal with that because you can be blamed.
Weird how that works consistently. Just find someone to blame, punish them, then all thought and discussion is over. Everything is back to normal. Bunch of fucking morons is what it is.
Microsoft... (Score:4, Informative)
...is one of the worst offenders.
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LOL, Microsoft is bad, but they are not elite like Google in this area. Microsoft is too greedy and hidebound to really be effective at Dark Patterns like Google. Their engineers can cook it up as well or better than Google engineers can... but Microsoft management gets in the way of the effectiveness because they can only think in terms of money.
Maximizing shareholder value (Score:4, Informative)
Many companies see dark patterns as a to-do list. Would you like fries with that?
Re:Maximizing shareholder value (Score:5, Informative)
Many companies see dark patterns as a to-do list. Would you like fries with that?
That's a nudge more than a dark pattern.
For an example of a dark pattern look no further than Amazon [amazon.com]:
1. Go to Your Subscribe & Save Items
2. Select the Subscriptions tab.
3. If you're logged in through a browser, select on the product image. If you're on a mobile device, select Edit.
4. Select Cancel subscription.
5. Select a cancellation reason.
6. Select Cancel my subscription.
A lot of people get to #4, click "Cancel Subscription", and think they are done. In fact, lets see the steps for Cancelling a Prime Membership... huh... why does Amazon.com give me an option for cancelling my Prime Membership...
WTF! WHY DO I HAVE A US PRIME MEMBERSHIP!!!!
Well lets see, I click 'End Membership' and see the message:
Quantaman, you still have time to enjoy your Prime benefits until the next billing cycle
So that really sounds like I cancelled. But of course, I haven't, the membership is still there and will bill me at the end of every month.
Hidden down at the bottom of the page are three small options. One of which is "Continue to cancel", I click that and only one more click until it seems to actually be cancelled.
Now that my friend is a very dark pattern, now I need to see if I can recover any of the money I wasted on a US Prime Membership that I was sure I cancelled months ago.
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Well the good news is they apparently refunded most of the period I was mistakenly subscribed.
The better news is this particular dark pattern is fairly easily solved through legislation.
1) Every 2 months, if the customer hasn't used the service, you need to send them an email reminding them they're still subscribed and offering them a chance to unsubscribe.
2) If they choose to unsubscribe you have to refund them for that period*.
Of course, there's a lot of little hacks and cheats you need to be on the looko
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At least they let you unsubscribe. Try unsubbing from the e-mail newsletter that comes "complimentary" with a magazine subscription. No matter how many times you go into your notifications preferences and unsubscribe from daily e-mail newsletters, they simply ignore you and keep sending them anyway. The links do nothing or point to nowhere.
There's dark patterns, and then there's lies... damn lies.
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That phrase/mandate helps fuel the Cluster-B Nation dark pattern in our society.
slippery slope to... (Score:2)
Behavioral Data. the new what? Currency.
Didn't Sun Tsu say knowledge was power?
I fear that there's a generation or two now that really can't think outside the metaphors of our technology.
It's normal now. I imagine many people like the real time spell checker that Microsoft uses even in a web browser. It's behavior is annoying, it STRONGLY encourages you to pick a word off a list. It's hard to get rid of the popup box with a mouse and keyboard. It's not what you expect nor want. Editin
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... I imagine many people like the real time spell checker that Microsoft uses even in a web browser. it's behavior is annoying, it STRONGLY encourages you to pick a word off a list....
...The dark patterns appeal to you because you're lazy and they make it sooo sooo easy for you. Who the fuck needs to actually know "spelling".
...You can't really question it, because you're trapped in it's idioms...
...its behavior is annoying...
You can't really question it, because you're trapped in its idioms.
= = = =
I apoligize. I was bored and I'm just breakin' your balls. [urbandictionary.com]
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consider said balls broken.. however...
I'm not exactly recommending this, but I have on occasion used contrived bad speling to prove to the reader I'm not an AI or haven't been stpel chckade.. I think there's a loss of agency once dependent on the tools, No? Because lazy is lazy. We're a bunch programmers here so you know very well what lazy is. We do it to save energy, get things done faster.... again get the psychologist to whip out the right term, but
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I hear you! However now I gotta point out my amazement recently having completed 'writing' code for a free, open-source Drupal module, specifically using Drupal Form API PHP code. The Drupal Form API is very mature and very rich, to include seriously standardized, secure Form API'd Ajax without having to write JS. I completed the, (impressive if you ask me), module by writing plain English prompts.
True, AI made mistakes, like proposing solutions that worked in older versions of Drupal of which there's a lot
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Here's an example prompt used I can easily recall off the top of my head to better explain:
"...Thank you. The code is working perfectly now so please don't change anything, however I still need these fields to have validation to ensure only URLs are input:
- field_apple ...and I just worked incrementally that way until I was 95% finished. The result by the way was a nice array I was too lazy to write to be clear.
- field_banana
- field_coconut
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...the more powerful the tools get, hopefully, the more work you get done. BUT the price is to have less knowledge of the deeper details and then ... well, where are you when it breaks?
Agreed. I've definitely studied and tested the code before I committed it into GIT. And it is great how you can ask for further explanation of some aspect. It's like doing a critical code review from a real person.
I had never used the PHP operator " ?: " before. Even after googling and reading this web page [stackoverflow.com], I still found it helpful to ask for more explanation from claude.ai.
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You can do that sort of thing on Github?
I only mentioned github as a training source for the LLMs. Microsoft does much with ChatGPT and owns Github, and there's a lot of Drupal Form API code scraped from there.
I just use free claude.ai and chatGPT prompts. Sometimes I run out of free credits and I have to wait several hours before I can try again for free. But seriously, try coding by prompt and just copy the relevant output into your IDE.
In fact often I'll include this in my prompt, (bearing in mind I was writing Drupal Form API code):
"Provide t
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K, thanks for that.
I'll actually give it try, when I'm out this current alligator pit...
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Looking back on this discussion, to clarify further, I find it important to focus on discrete code changes, just like when one tries to commit code to GIT in order to close a JIRA ticket. There's always a code review involved, and with that perspective hopefully now coding with a chatbot makes more sense.
And there's nothing wrong with asking AI to write the basic code just to get your project started.
You should already know the rules of coding, at least for the most part, the basics. And know your current r
California (Score:3)
If anyone in CA uses these apps, let the AG's office know. Dark Patterns are specifically prohibited by CCPA and its succesor CPRA.
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If anyone in CA uses these apps, let the AG's office know. Dark Patterns are specifically prohibited by CCPA and its succesor CPRA.
Google used Dark Patterns against me to delete an account I had created with my real name. I even noted the Dark Patterns in my interactions with support. They took no pity and deleted my account.
California will not do a single fucking thing to Google. I like your aspirational optimism there.
elderly and low income (Score:4, Insightful)
You want to see where the dark patterns are? Look at all the apps that target the elderly, low income, and the under served communities. You'll see first hand just hard dark some of these patterns really are. It's down right obvious it's not even funny.
So sick of this stuff.. (Score:5, Informative)
I design websites for a living, and refuse to participate in these systems and games.
Take pop-ups, like for newsletters.
How is that acceptable? So many people are forced to close those stupid things who either have no interest, or are already subscribed. I bet on any given site with one of these, about 0.0000001% of people sign up, and the rest are just irritated over and over.
There are so many instances where I click on an email newsletter link article, and as I get to that very article I immediately get a f*cking pop-up asking me to subscribe to their newsletter.....which I just clicked in from.
I refuse to do pop-ups for customers, and refuse to sign up for sites that have pop-ups now. Part of the battle is also refusing to play along. Tell those sites how dumb they're being as well.
Corporations call it (Score:4, Insightful)
marketing.
Seriously, this is how the marketers do it. They make the buttons they want you to click, big and bold, and the ones they don't want you to click, tiny and out of the way.
Advertisers have always done this, even before the web was a thing. That's why they call it the "fine print." It's the text that undoes all the promises that the large print proclaims.
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It's not just marketing though, it's dark patterns. I'll give an example I encountered. I was using Dominos app to order a pizza and I clicked Ok a few times for my order to go through and another popup appeared with Ok in the same place and I almost clicked it. It was for some sleazy 3rd party service called "Complete Savings" that inserts itself into the checkout process of some websites and mimics part of the process, with some bold text telling people they can save money on their next order.
If I HAD cli
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I'm not disagreeing with you. Today's marketers are all about dark patterns. Developing dark patterns is the fundamental activity that marketers engage in.
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Indeed. Like Google permitting ads that look like a download button, and having them appear plastered all over some application's web page. This is part the developer's fault for putting ads on the download page, but since Google clearly knows the page is for software download (how else would the scum be able to bid specifically for these spots), they should not serve these deceptive ads.
Deserve contempt (Score:2)
Auto-pay is a bad idea for any online service. If you handed-over permission to take money without reading the rules for cancelling it first, you deserve the contempt of that corporation.
Yes of course they do (Score:2)
When was the last time anyone signed up for a subscription and it DIDN'T set to autorenew at the end without asking? And when someone goes looking to cancel it wasn't in the place it was expected to be? And when they did eventually find how to cancel, the service made them run a gauntlet of scary popups that were designed to confuse and dissuade?
I've used 2 subscription services where they literally threw about 5 popups between me saying I want to cancel and them letting me cancel. One was Now TV and the ot
Doctor's office and Phreesia (Score:5, Insightful)
My doctor's office uses a company named Phreesia to streamline the check-in process. Days before the appointment, you receive a text or email to their site to fill out all the paperwork you would normally do when you arrive at the office. All the forms are standard legalese that require signature-- except one, and that's the last page. And it's not obvious that it's optional:
"I hereby authorize my healthcare provider to release to Phreesia's Check-in system my health information entered during the automated Check-in process, or on file with my healthcare provider, to help determine the health-related materials I will receive as part of my use of Phreesia. The health-related materials may include information and advertisements related to treatments and therapies specific to my health status. The materials may be provided by my health insurance plan, a pharmaceutical manufacturer or another healthcare entity. Phreesia may receive a payment for making such information available to me through the Check-in System or Phreesia's Patient Communication Services including items such as newsletters, patient reminders for visits, medication/treatment adherence and other practice-related services."
Just because it's legal to do this to your patients, doesn't make it right.
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Welcome to Wall Street's America Dream.
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Just because it's legal to do this to your patients, doesn't make it right.
Even worse, if you looked, you would notice that Google scripts ran on that page (thank you NoScript!). Those scripts hoovered up all of your data before you even hit "Submit". Google will become a government department once the three letter agencies realize exactly how much data Google has on the population.