Adobe is so goddamn dumb. They want people to use their cloud collaboration platform so badly they put this stupid Share button in the tool bar, and left it floating over the top of actually useful buttons, like the one to OK a crop.
Everyone hates this, and used to disable it, so they took away the user's ability to turn the button off.
@thegamerstavern it boggles the mind: even with a 'reject all' option (that is not often there at all) there is still a long list of parties with 'legitimate interest' (whatever the fork that is) and after you've swiped all of those to oblivion then there often is a list of 'vendors' that also all want a piece of the pie. Vendors list not being influenced by the earlier 'reject ' and counting 50 or 60 entries.... #darkpatterns much? 😑
I filed my taxes over the weekend, and I was amazed at the dark patterns TurboTax gets away with to try to convince you to give up your data. The wording and style is similar to other legitimate tasks you need to complete in the final review stage.
Pondering switching back, as I like the sandboxing.
I was using calyx because it's a little easier to set up out-of-the-box, and because they had the old-style instant on/off wifi and BT toggles, but Google nerfed that in the latest release. I hope they find a way to restore it, I utterly despise the new two-tap wifi & bt toggles #DarkPatterns
India has taken a significant step towards protecting consumer rights by banning #darkpatterns. These manipulative design tactics undermine user choice and are now illegal under new regulations
52 pages of community comments in a year and Spotify still hasn't done anything about forced "Smart Shuffle" #enshittification on their app 🥴 Give a lil upvote if you can
@eWatchers
Il y a quelques mois, @pixeldetracking avait déjà largement parlé de cette fameuse société Valiuz dans son article « Chez @Decathlon, c'est "à fond la surveillance" » ! qui décortique dans le détail les processus de collecte (de pillage) des #DonnéesPersonnelles mis en œuvre par #Décathlon et ses « partenaires ».
Un véritable festival de cynisme, de #DarkPatterns, de mauvaise foi, etc. qui doit se reproduire pour toutes les enseignes de la famille Mulliez.
less laden with unnecessary racist & colonial baggage from the Enlightenment
already established within #UX conversations by the website https://www.deceptive.design/about-us , who prudently changed their name due to this whole set of concerns.
Thanks everyone for considering this small-but-important wording improvement.
Now back to doing whatever awesomeness you were doing!
India has officially outlawed nine types of #UX#DarkPatterns, including saying "Hurry, only X amount left;" adding "processing fees;" adding dire language to opt-out buttons ("No, I'd rather not protect my purchase"); forcing people to agree to a EULA; forcing people to call a phone number to unsubscribe; using confusing opt-out language ("No, don't unsubscribe me"); blending ads into editorial content; and forcing people to click "remind me later" every day. https://bootcamp.uxdesign.cc/dark-patterns-are-now-illegal-in-india-6b3c35c5ce50
We are also working directly with select AI companies as long as their plans align with what our community cares about: attribution, opt-outs, and control.
Emphasis mine
This is not the tech industry’s most egregious lack of understanding of consent in recent years. That dishonor belongs to LegalFling: A blockchain app for sexual consent.
However, this is still pretty stupid, and the result of an insidious trend that doesn’t get questioned enough in software engineering circles. So I’m asking that my readers shout this from the fucking rooftops.
Opt-Out Is NOT Consent
Opt-out is “our lawyers told us to make this an option to cover our ass, but we don’t want you to actually do it”.
Opt-out is “if you missed the memo, we assume we have your consent”.
The default state of any decision regarding user data should be opted out. Users should instead be required to opt in for your decision to take effect, and they must not be coerced into doing so.
If consent is not explicitly given by an informed user, you haven’t received consent at all, and to pretend otherwise is unethical.
Your users don’t fucking care about opt-out. We care about opt-in.
“But Soatok, That’ll Hurt Our Revenue”
If you have to make money doing unethical things, or by following dubious practices that don’t actually respect other users’ autonomy, then you should go out of business.
End of.
What Automattic Should Do
If Automattic wants to make things right, they must do two things and could do a third thing (but I’m not holding my breath):
First, nuke the existing opt-out mechanism and replace it with an opt-in mechanism. If nobody checks it, then don’t include their data in the sale to Midjourney or OpenAI.
Second, they should make the permission for third-parties more granular. Some of us don’t care about third parties, but do NOT want “AI” companies using their data to enable plagiarism.
Third, if you want to go the extra mile, add support for a plugin that uses Nightshade on all hosted media in all WordPress.com plans, including free plans, to increase your users’ protection against LLM scrapists.
This is my open challenge to Automattic leadership to do better.
This Issue is Bigger than Automattic
The tech industry has gotten very bad at respecting users’ consent lately. Your options are no longer “Yes” and “No” anymore. Instead it’s “Yes” or “Maybe Later”, without a “Never” option.
ugh not even @signalapp is safe from the unstoppable deprecation of consent in favour of “not now” pic.twitter.com/sW4Ss2pqMb
It does keep going. I’m going to skip a few, but check it out.> the unstoppable deprecation of consent in favour of “not now”, episode 18 pic.twitter.com/CRdfujOBZt
Yes, even Linux is affected.Even worse, you can rarely uninstall the crapware that nags you with these consent dialogs.
This needs to stop. It’s a toxic mentality and it cultivates a culture that doesn’t respect humanity. (Which is kind of funny to write as a furry blogger.)
If you work in the tech industry, scream very loudly about properly implementing human-respecting consent controls into your software.
Just because it’s widespread doesn’t mean it’s inevitable. Push back against it. Your less privileged, less technical neighbors deserve better.
I've read that #WhatsApp wants to interoperate with other #messenger applications, to align with #DigitalMarketsAct. My problem with their #UX approach is that it's only planned as a third-party tab, with no promise of a setting that would place all the chats on the single page.
I realize they have security reservations, but I smell a dark pattern here: only do I message my people on WhatsApp from Matrix, they'd have to change tabs, making a chat with me stick like a sore thumb - or not stick at all.
Hot bottom-line: hiding behind a tab is no different than cutting off #interoperability altogether. Multi-messenger chats should become a first-party feature in synchronous software, to comply with #DMA. Targeted apps that don't care about such regulation have no future.
Words With Friends 2 is a showcase of dark patterns:
Animated pop-up ads where the close button is not in a consistent place, to trick you into clicking on something.
All-or-nothing notifications, so you can't turn on "it's your turn" and leave off "are you interested in buying candy-colored letter themes? how about now? HOW ABOUT NOW, MOTHER&*#$ER?".
Games you haven't accepted are lumped in with games you're currently playing, both marked "it's your turn".
I was confused as to why I was still getting notifications from the Journal app when I could’ve sworn I disabled notifications. Apparently you have to disable it in two places. #DarkPatterns#Apple