181–190 of 224 posts
So, I deactivated my account maybe 6 months ago, and uninstalled the app long ago. Since then, I moved halfway across the country and, using a brand new laptop, a fake name and number, and a throwaway email address, created another profile so I could use their API. People You May Know still had old high school friends, my old real estate broker (??), and someone I starred on GitHub. I have absolutely no idea how they…
This is one of the many dark patterns that Facebook uses. It simply does not respect any boundaries the user might wish to have in place... Install it on your phone? Anyone you have in your phone's address book gets to see your picture under "people you may know". Someone in your family joins Facebook and friends you? Now everyone you are friends with gets prompted about whether or not they know your family member. W…
LinkedIn is pretty bad at trying though. I got a new job not long ago, they congratulated me on it, two days later or so, and even now still they keep sending me emails about my next future job. I barely have gotten my feet wet at this one... What in the world?
This is one of the many dark patterns that Facebook uses. It simply does not respect any boundaries the user might wish to have in place... Install it on your phone? Anyone you have in your phone's address book gets to see your picture under "people you may know". Someone in your family joins Facebook and friends you? Now everyone you are friends with gets prompted about whether or not they know your family member. W…
I definitely did not consent to sharing my address book contacts with Facebook, and frankly nor would I want to. Now WhatsApp is offering an "opt-out" option, but I'm not sure how that will help. Isn't it a little too late for that now?
[0]: https://blog.whatsapp.com/10000627/Looking-ahead-for-WhatsAp...
This is one of the many dark patterns that Facebook uses. It simply does not respect any boundaries the user might wish to have in place... Install it on your phone? Anyone you have in your phone's address book gets to see your picture under "people you may know". Someone in your family joins Facebook and friends you? Now everyone you are friends with gets prompted about whether or not they know your family member. W…
The whole premise of FB is to "connect people", whether or not you like it, so it's not an entirely unexpected behaviour from them. It's also the reason I don't use FB, and never will.
This is one of the many dark patterns that Facebook uses. It simply does not respect any boundaries the user might wish to have in place... Install it on your phone? Anyone you have in your phone's address book gets to see your picture under "people you may know". Someone in your family joins Facebook and friends you? Now everyone you are friends with gets prompted about whether or not they know your family member. W…
This is one of the many dark patterns that Facebook uses. It simply does not respect any boundaries the user might wish to have in place... Install it on your phone? Anyone you have in your phone's address book gets to see your picture under "people you may know". Someone in your family joins Facebook and friends you? Now everyone you are friends with gets prompted about whether or not they know your family member. W…
I know it's seems like it's 'dark pattern' week on HN, but not everything is a dark pattern. Dark Patterns are user interfaces that are designed to trick users. Facebook requests the permission to go through your stuff and if you read their data use policy, they go so far as to tell you in detail exactly the information they're taking from you, as well as how they use it. Sure, it's a little bothersome when the infor…
Convincing users to accept a feature they would otherwise opt out of if they had a reasonable choice and/or fully understood the feature seems like a textbook dark pattern to me. Hiding the data collection policy inside a giant EULA or using a carrot feature as a lure is indeed intended to trick the user. The fact that many services have adopted these tactics does not change their being dark patterns; it just means dark patterns have proliferated and become the norm.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know it's seems like it's 'dark pattern' week on HN, but not everything is a dark pattern. Dark Patterns are user interfaces that are designed to trick users. Facebook requests the permission to go through your stuff and if you read their data use policy, they go so far as to tell you in detail exactly the information they're taking from you, as well as how they use it. Sure, it's a little bothersome when the infor…
Pretty sure we need a new term if a term is being co-opted to mean something it's not. Something like "malign algorithm", or "encroaching design" might do.
This is about exploiting the exposure of unique identifiers (phone number mapped to email), and an interloping tattle-tale ratting out their correlation to the same owner.
It's something more akin to a Prisoner's Dilema, except people aren't cognizant that "They Are The Product" so no one thinks of themselves as prisoners ratting out conspirators.
Amazed that this 'feature' hasn't been killed yet. At this stage of Facebook's maturity, everybody finished adding their real friends about five years ago, and suggesting non-friends with tenuous connections to the user serves only to remind everyone what a privacy disaster Facebook is and generate bad press.
The other side of that argument is: You don't stop making friends & meeting people, why should Facebook stop suggesting people you might know? I moved out of state three years ago, most of the people I see & spend most of my time with a completely different than the people I did five years ago.
This is one of the many dark patterns that Facebook uses. It simply does not respect any boundaries the user might wish to have in place... Install it on your phone? Anyone you have in your phone's address book gets to see your picture under "people you may know". Someone in your family joins Facebook and friends you? Now everyone you are friends with gets prompted about whether or not they know your family member. W…
I know it's seems like it's 'dark pattern' week on HN, but not everything is a dark pattern. Dark Patterns are user interfaces that are designed to trick users. Facebook requests the permission to go through your stuff and if you read their data use policy, they go so far as to tell you in detail exactly the information they're taking from you, as well as how they use it. Sure, it's a little bothersome when the infor…
It's a similar sort of dark pattern to the practice of putting the important details of a contract hidden in a massive block of text rendered in a tiny font.
Yes, they are technically being upfront about what is going on, in the same way that two pages of 8pt legal boilerplate informs the signer of the details of a written contract.
If it weren't a dark pattern it would be very easy to turn off the undesirable bits, and users would rarely be surprised by the consequences of the default settings.
Let's not forget that contrary to our poor performance on abstract logic puzzles, humans of all levels of intellect are superbly good at reasoning about potentially embarrassing social situations. Hence FB must work hard to de-emphasize the way FB actually works to make people consent to many of the default permissions. That is in my opinion the definition of a dark pattern.
It is the gray area enabled by these practices that makes FB's content interesting... because accidentally over-shared content is interesting to us about a small percentage of the people we are friends with. It's nearly a law of human nature that we are fascinated by obscure details of a small percentage of people for all sorts of reasons (sexual interest, jealousy/aspiration, schadenfreude, stalking, etc.) and we all have some small group of people who are interested in our obscure likes/posts for the same reasons. Rarely do we overtly interact with such people (in either direction) because it is socially awkward, but FB generates revenue/engagement off of the lurking that we all do and the blindness people have that they too are the target of such lurking by others (which is why the dark pattern works)... it's what makes FB scratch a particular voyeuristic itch for people and why it's been so successful. LinkedIn works the same way but for things like job changes, promotions, etc.