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Some Dark Patterns Now Illegal in UK

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Re: Some Dark Patterns Now Illegal in UK

#211

Post by lorddoig »

ZoFreX wrote: post #169
Padding wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this basically what Amazon does? I've always felt very comfortable and safe when pushing the buy button on their site.

Here's my Amazon challenge: Find a phone charger on Amazon that: * Isn't one of Amazon's own * Doesn't have a single review saying it caught fire or exploded Amazon is completely happy selling poor quality or even counterfeit goods, phone chargers are a particularly bad area of the site but others exist as well. There is no way Amazon could claim ignorance of this - there are 100s of reviews on some products such as…

Can you even begin to imagine what hell it would cause Amazon, at their scale, to be burdened with policing that? It would require a whole building full of Amazon compliance officers who won't always get it right - and when they don't they'd be liable which would cost more even more money and create ill feeling between Amazon and its customers as they'd be making assurances that they could not possibly keep (the story of every consumer protection law ever, btw.)

Seems to me the review system - by your account, not mine - is working just as intended.

Re: Some Dark Patterns Now Illegal in UK

#212

Post by brey »

epaga wrote: post #3

Sounds like an excellent law to stop the horrid practices in so many online shops. Let's hope a form of this law spreads throughout Europe and the U.S. This caught my eye, however: "A failure to comply cancels the transaction. You can get your money back and keep the goods. If the sale was for a service or a digital download, the contract is cancelled and no further payments are due." Wow. Seems like it would make a…

This almost exists already, in a slightly different form - it's the same principle as the unsolicited goods laws codified in eg. the UK's Consumer Protection Regulations[1]; if I send stuff to someone without it being asked for, they legally own it and I can't insist on payment.

Same thing now applies to bundling unwanted extra crap in with a real order - it's just the extra stuff which may not be charged for.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Protection_(Distance_S...

> If goods are sent to a consumer without a contract asking for them, the "recipient may [...] use, deal with, or dispose of the goods as if they were an unconditional gift to him"

which happens to be an incorporation of a 15-year old EU directive:

http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/ALL/?uri=CELEX:319...

> Article 9

> Inertia selling

> Member States shall take the measures necessary to:

> - prohibit the supply of goods or services to a consumer without their being ordered by the consumer beforehand, where such supply involves a demand for payment,

> - exempt the consumer from the provision of any consideration in cases of unsolicited supply, the absence of a response not constituting consent.

Re: Some Dark Patterns Now Illegal in UK

#213

Post by dzhiurgis »

saosebastiao wrote: post #202
rmc wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a few addresses in my amazon account, and post to one 99% of the time. It shouldn't take a genius to figure that out.

And misquote to you 1% of the time? That would open them up to a fraud claim 1% of the time.

Billing address won't change the shipping address.

Re: Some Dark Patterns Now Illegal in UK

#214

Post by Kalium »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #131
Kalium wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's amazing what personal greed and arrogance will do to ideology.

I'd say: it's amazing how ideology can shut one's mind down. But then again, isn't that written into definition of ideology?

I'm not sure I agree that ideology automatically shuts a mind. After all, being open-minded is an ideological position as well.

I was just thinking that some ideologies seem to exist for the purpose of allowing people to justify their greedy behavior.

Re: Some Dark Patterns Now Illegal in UK

#215

Post by dzhiurgis »

ajb wrote: post #149
Crito wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first I agree with, but I'm not sure what you mean by "Sneaking in Prime". "Fucked up search" is almost certainly not deliberate. I suspect it costs them a good deal of sales when people cannot find what they wanted to purchase. I don't think you can call that an 'dark pattern' unless it is deliberate and they are working some sort of angle.

I don't know what GP meant, but maybe Amazon is aiming for a spot where it's easy to find something that fits the bill, but hard to find the cheapest thing that fits the bill. That's generally been my experience with their search, anyway.

Exactly.

Also they tend to search for synonyms, which sometimes returns ridiculous amount of results.

Re: Some Dark Patterns Now Illegal in UK

#216

Post by dzhiurgis »

tspiteri wrote: post #104
dzhiurgis wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No they don't: * Can't get shipping charges before the last step (after selecting the credit card which implies I am about to pay) * Sneaking in Prime * Fucked up search

For the shipping charges, it used to be like you say, but since some time now, if I go to the basket, a little below the "Proceed to Checkout" button there is an "Estimate VAT, Postage and Packaging" option.

Nice one, did not know that. Thank you.

What is also confusing "Dispatch to this address" button. Am I going to pay now with no return? When do I get the actual price?

Re: Some Dark Patterns Now Illegal in UK

#217

Post by lorddoig »

Karunamon wrote: post #210
lorddoig wrote: post #203

Take the number of times you've heard the sentiment "and this will protect consumers! yay!" - call it h (for hope ). Now take the number of times you've heard such sentiments be justified in a logical, rigorous manner - call it j . Calculate an independent thought index, t , as follows: j / h . Call me if it's greater than 0.01. I'll be over here in the corner watching as we entrench half- (or hundredth-?)baked ideas…

I find it really, really hard to give a crap about the poor ickle businesses in this case, because you're not going to trip over these laws unless you're going out of your way to do something sneaky. If you enter into it with good faith, i.e. be as forthright as possible with your customer, you won't end up in a situation where these laws will ever apply to you. The people that will have a massive "cognitive load" ar…

Not true. UK law is common law, not a civil code. There is always room for masses of interpretation, as rather verbally described in various case studies in the article. That is cognitive load for every diligent business owner out there.

Also I'm surprised that in this day and age (and on HN, no less) I can still find people passively conflating legality with morality ("good faith").

Your argument also fails to touch on the main point I made - that the internet is best left alone, and that it wouldn't have become the amazing thing it has if the regulators were competent enough to get their teeth into it on day one. Regulation is almost always expansionary - the slippery slope is not a logical fallacy when backed up with decades worth of prior evidence. The cognitive load from where this stuff leads will affect all businesses and it will create hidden costs and that will put prices up and that will inhibit growth and that will have a real impact on the length of the next recession (to name a few.)

An economy is like a body of water, except waves multiply instead of dissipate when you prod it, which makes it incredibly hard to intuit (especially for the likes of career politicians) what's going to happen when you do. You need to sit down and figure it the hell out, and the point I made in my first paragraph is that we don't do that nearly enough - as a society we'd much rather stand around and have a massive circlejerk over our good intentions that we've convinced ourselves are correct out of nothing more than the same kind of intuition that previously led us to believe the earth was flat and the sun revolved around it.

Re: Some Dark Patterns Now Illegal in UK

#218

Post by saosebastiao »

dzhiurgis wrote: post #213
saosebastiao wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And misquote to you 1% of the time? That would open them up to a fraud claim 1% of the time.

Billing address won't change the shipping address.

And if I'm sending a gift to an address that isn't already in my account?

Ship cost estimates are far more difficult than just making an assumption about where it will be shipped to. You just flat out can't quote a shipping cost unless you know for sure what the address is, or else the act of quoting shipping can actually be considered fraudulent. They get the delivery address at the same stage as the payment information because it allows for an easy "Shipping address is same as billing address" option.

For anyone that is too skeptical about entering payment information before seeing shipping costs, there is an option to estimate your shipping costs beforehand. It requires more work though, which is why it is an optional step.

Re: Some Dark Patterns Now Illegal in UK

#219

Post by vacri »

Someone1234 wrote: post #105
pdpi wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find that it's increasingly the case that "Europe" gets used in place of EU in much the same way as people will say "America" when they mean the USA.

Then people are "increasingly" using it incorrectly. Europe is a continent, the EU is a political alliance. There are too many countries within Europe but not in the EU to use the terms synonymously. For example: Albania, Andorra, Belarus, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Macedonia, Moldova, Monaco, Montenegro, Norway, Russia, San Marino, Serbia, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine, Vatican City I think…

So in that list you have three large countries that are famously not part of the general european political bloc, noted for usually being part of their own bloc. Then you have a bunch of countries that are so miniscule, that diplomatic relations are handled for them by diplomats assigned for other countries (Monaco? A couple of square kilometers. San Marino? Fewer people than my suburb). Then there's Turkey, which has a technical foothold on the continent, but has never been considered politically part of Europe. Then the Balkan states, most of which are trying to get into the EU (as is Turkey, to be fair). You're left with Norway and Switzerland, neither of which are in the EU, so there's some support there, but they do have strong bilateral links with the EU, such as with the Schengen Area.

I mean, you're so desperate to find counter-examples, you've even included an island nation (Iceland) that is nowhere near Europe, especially given your own definition that 'Europe' is specifically a continent. Iceland isn't even on the European continental shelf.

It's clear that there are multiple values for the term 'Europe', and that the socio-political one is a bit different to the is-it-on-a-connected-landmass one. Otherwise Ireland and the UK would not be part of Europe...

Re: Some Dark Patterns Now Illegal in UK

#220

Post by oditogre »

icelancer wrote: post #163
mikestew wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When I booked flights to Dublin recently, I felt being cheated on even though I checked everything twice and googled some. Why on earth would you do business with a company that makes you " cheated"? RyanAir ran off all of the other airlines? They had the only flight to Dublin to see your poor, sick mother? Flights so cheap that you're willing to put up with the bullshit? It's an honest question, and I've heard som…

> Why on earth would you do business with a company that makes you " cheated"? Because everyone bitches about them but everyone still uses them, since after all, they are the cheapest. They just like to hurl rocks from the top of the mountain without actually doing anything productive about it - i.e. taking their money elsewhere.

Yup, same as WalMart, hehe. They're awful and evil and rahrahrah, but at 1am on Sunday when everywhere else is closed, they'll sell you a loaf of bread, electric drill, computer monitor, a case of beer, and new underwear, and they'll do it at a lower price than any other store in town. So people hate it, but they still go there.
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