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Dark patterns after the GDPR: consent pop-ups and their influence

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111–120 of 234 posts

Re: Dark patterns after the GDPR: consent pop-ups and their influence

#111

The paper is paywalled. Is it freely available anywhere? edit arxiv's preprint: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2001.02479.pdf Also, off-topic: it's annoying that acm.org has now added a horizontal progress bar, similar to QuantaMagazine.org. I already know how far through the article I am, my browser shows me a scrollbar.

> my browser shows me a scrollbar.

It is useful for mobile browser users.

Re: Dark patterns after the GDPR: consent pop-ups and their influence

#112
post #53

For me personally - all these popup banners and modal walls for websites about cookies and stuff just really make the internet a worse place. I suspect that empirically, they don't accomplish what the GDPR intended to - and they make the internet less enjoyable. Thanks GDPR.

That's like accusing the flashlight of making rats scurry under the floorboard

You keep using this when people complain about GDPR consent banners. We get it, cookies are bad and privacy needs to be protected.

It's just a really disingenuous and dismissive comparison. Nobody is complaining about flashlights.

GDPR may have been necessary, but the complete garbage heap of an experience the popups have turned the web into is worth lamenting.

Re: Dark patterns after the GDPR: consent pop-ups and their influence

#113
post #63
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every time I see the term 'dark pattern', it's always a case of one or the other, with the delineation into fraud varying depending on the relevant laws. In this case, they mention how websites skirt the minimum GDPR requirements and trick the users to do what they want, so it looks to be both. The term is in the best case superfluous, in the worst case a harmful euphemism.

Your top level post reads as if people who use 'dark patterns' as a term have an agenda, and that agenda is fraud and psychological manipulation.

I read it as primarily saying that the thing which 'dark patterns' refers to is more plainly called "fraud and psychological manipulation, not so much that merely using 'dark patterns' as a euphemism is itself "fraud...etc." Suspicious perhaps, but as an indirect second-order thing.

It can be seen as ambiguous, but a lot of language relies on assumptions about what a reasonable person would be thinking. Which causes trouble if you're trying to express a contrary or startling opinion.

Re: Dark patterns after the GDPR: consent pop-ups and their influence

#114
post #68
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you consider the fact that bread and fruit and veg are always at the start of a supermarket journey a dark pattern? Supermarkets have gotten customers to spend more than they intended with all their patterns as well -- just like social media sites get customers to spend more time online. It's just what they optimise for. The concept is much older than the coined word.

Most of a supermarket's layout is determined by hard requirements like refrigeration, stocking heavy items and handling payments. If you're wondering why, for instance, the milk is in the back, it's because it needs to stay cool and it's heavy.

Most of a supermarket's layout is determined by hard requirements like refrigeration, stocking heavy items and handling payments.

That hasn't been generally true for a long time. The big chains spend a fortune deciding how their stores should be presented and optimising the layout of different products, and there is a lot of sophisticated analysis going on behind the scenes. There are certainly recurring themes in the results, but for example there are several major stores near me that have totally different layouts in many respects including all of the ones you mentioned, and it would be surprising if any of those differences was an accident. The stores don't run all those loyalty card schemes, nor rearrange their products from time to time, just for fun!

Re: Dark patterns after the GDPR: consent pop-ups and their influence

#115
post #88

What absolutely infuriates me is this "legitimate interest" crap that is almost always hidden away, and often you have to scroll through literally hundreds of opt-outs with no way to disable them all in a single click. If I'm so damn "legimately interested", why is it on by default and basically impossible to turn off? Find me one person on this earth who is legitimately interested in being tracked by marketing compa…

It's usually a good hint that it really isn't a legitimate intrest case if they allow you to turn it off. A legitimate intrest does not require an opt in (or an opt out). Consent does. If the page mixes those two up they're either clueless or trying to walk in the gray area and don't really understand(or don't want to understand) what either of those terms mean.

Legitimate Interest has a legal definition as a Legal Basis. It's a list of Purposes and Special Features that a Vendor declares to the IAB that they claim to need [0]. A User absoultely has the right to Object to Consent and Legitimate Interest.

Any CMP that does not allow you to opt-out is on shaky GDPR legal ground.

[0] https://vendor-list.consensu.org/v2/vendor-list.json (see 'vendors' object)

Re: Dark patterns after the GDPR: consent pop-ups and their influence

#116
post #98

How about introducing a standard way to declare and categorize cookies and let browser take care of consent? On first start set your default cookie preferences for all websites and adjust per website, when needed. It could be quickly build as an extension first and later moved to browser core.

This would be so easy for shady tracking websites to circumvent

Re: Dark patterns after the GDPR: consent pop-ups and their influence

#117
post #68
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you consider the fact that bread and fruit and veg are always at the start of a supermarket journey a dark pattern? Supermarkets have gotten customers to spend more than they intended with all their patterns as well -- just like social media sites get customers to spend more time online. It's just what they optimise for. The concept is much older than the coined word.

Most of a supermarket's layout is determined by hard requirements like refrigeration, stocking heavy items and handling payments. If you're wondering why, for instance, the milk is in the back, it's because it needs to stay cool and it's heavy.

The whole concept of the placement of the milk being suspicious and needing an explanation never made sense to me. Why would they or should they optimize for people who go to the supermarket just to buy milk? It makes perfect sense to me from the point of view of usually buying more than one thing per trip.

If in a "normal" grocery store trip you go through most of the store then of course you want to get refrigerated and frozen foods last, just before you go to the checkout. So they don't warm up too much.

By the way, frozen stuff is not all on the perimeter in my experience of US supermarkets. It's funny how something can be so mundane and everyday you never really look at it.

Re: Dark patterns after the GDPR: consent pop-ups and their influence

#118
post #72
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is this downvoted? This is exactly what happend. Speaking with non tech savvy users here in Germany, they feel safe and secure on Facebook and fear the „world wide west“ that the open Web has become, where you need to click 20 consent messages on every website without knowing what all that stuff means. This is just like EULAs - one more annoying thing they simply accept with a slightly bad gut feeling.

One thing I don’t understand is why in the good lords name do I have to consent to being tracked every day when I have already agreed to the goddamn cookie jar? Often several times per day as well!

On iPhone at least Safari seems to throw away cookies with wild abandon resulting in the stupid popups continually popping up.

Re: Dark patterns after the GDPR: consent pop-ups and their influence

#119
post #19

I recently purchased something from the official UK Nintendo Store [1]. I did not opt-in, and was not asked to opt-in, to marketing emails. Several days after purchase I received a marketing email with an Unsubscribe link. I submitted a GDPR enquiry and after a few weeks I get: Having investigated this matter fully, we can see that you were opted in as a result of a small technical difficulty which we are now fixing.…

I have a different issue myself. Despite having opted-in to marketing e-mails I never have obtained a marketing e-mail from Nintendo since then. Nintendo's website shows that I have agreed to "receive promotional e-mails". At one point I did in fact unsubscribe, but later I resubscribed. I think that there is a bug that sometimes causes promotional e-mail setting to not be updated in newsletter database (maybe the se…

Main bulk mailing companies (iContact, Sendgrid) will make a blocklist for you of anyone who has unsubscribed - and if you're not careful about it once on you'll NEVER get off - and it prevents send to those addresses even if you later re-add them to your list.
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