Norwegian Consumer Council report on how tech companies use dark patterns [pdf]

I don't think it's crazy either, I just think it's totally inappropriate to tell people to think less of their friends when they don't have the full context.

There's a lot of FB employees on HN and I wager a lot of them know how scummy their employer is. Yes, many are staying for the paycheck (and because leaving a job isn't an easy thing for everyone), but I know several who are staying because they feel that their position is where they can produce the most good for the world.

Similarly, I know many people in politics who despise who/what they work for, but keep at it because that is where they can make a difference.

It doesn't always work. But it also doesn't make me think less of them. At least of the ones who aren't staying because of the $.

This is the most ridiculous comment I've seen all month. I don't know if it's due to ignorance or some PR department in Redmond. Microsoft is the worst by far when it comes to privacy violations and dark patterns. And it's obvious to anyone who's ever heard about Windows 10 in the news over the past few years. But let me break it down anyway.

First of all, Windows 10 is constantly stealing your personal info. To an extent not even possible to a website like Facebook since websites don't have direct access to your hardware. Some of the things they collect are:

- User contacts

- Calendar data

- Location data

- Keyboard input (keylogger)

- Microphone input (wiretap)

- Local files

- Installed programs

- How long you interact with programs

- Browser history

Have you ever read their 45 page policy document? It's chock full of goodies like:

>“We will access, disclose and preserve personal data, including your content (such as the content of your emails, other private communications or files in private folders), when we have a good faith belief that doing so is necessary to.”

Fun. If you want to disable this, you have to go through 13 pages of settings in the general settings menu, disable settings through their dumb cortana thing, go to an external website to disable more settings and sign up for a Microsoft account (which requires giving Microsoft your phone number). And these preferences can be magically reset by Microsoft whenever they feel like it.

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/07/30/windows-10-priva...

>3. This is the crucial one, and so fundamental to Windows 10’s tracking that Microsoft have stuck the setting on an external website, which they say is so that it’s on one easy dashboard, but I find it hard not to wonder if it’s in the hope that we don’t easily stumble across it while browsing Windows 10’s own Privacy menus. Said website is colourful and cheerful and can play a video at you talking about how wonderful targeted advertising is. Ignore the bumf and instead go directly here and set both options to Off. It’s the innocuous-sounding “Personalised ads wherever I use my Microsoft account” which is the likely root of all this, because having that on means Windows 10 itself becomes a hub for targeted ads. You’ll probably have set up Windows 10 with a Microsoft account, because it heavily encourages you to do so with talk of synchronised files and settings and a OneDrive cloud account during installation, but this means the OS is signed into that account all the time. As a result, Windows 10 itself has it spyglasses on, not just apps or pages that you’re signed into with your MS account. I notice that every time I go back to that page, the “Personalised ads in this browser” setting has silently turned itself back on again. This is concerning

Oh yeah, and updates can completely reset these settings, making all that effort pointless.

https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/5-settings-must-check-windows-...

>Recently, a very big update to Windows 10 was released, which brought with it some nice improvements. But what was not publicized in Microsoft’s fanfare was that the update very quietly reset your privacy settings, and reset the default apps back to Windows Store apps. Gee thanks Redmond.

Anyone who still uses Windows 10 in this day in age is a sucker. And anyone who believes these deluge of green accounts shilling for Microsoft is a double sucker.

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There's a difference between working at Facebook actively being involved in the creation of such scummy designs, dark patterns, etc; and merely working on one of its open source libraries. Facebook does do some good and comparing what they're doing to war crimes ... does that really help?

I would pay money to have someone clean up my data online since I live in a GDPR country.

I have this weird conspiracy in my brain that big IT companies are just fronts for what the CIA/NSA/governments need to do to do their job.

I don't think those companies really care about getting your data, but government do, because governments saw and know that the internet is not something they directly control. Information is power, and it flows beyond the government's reach and proper authority. I don't really understand how those companies work so hard at great extents to get that data at the limit of the law or morality. I don't see how it's not the government doing this for security or economic reasons.

Liberty and freedom of speech are important, but until the internet, governments were able to have their eyes on sensitive tools. Now citizens have access to technologies that can do a lot of things at the speed of light, so in a way, governments are losing control, so it's natural that governments are trying to get back the control they lost.

Of course politically it's not going to please everyone, but I think that the golden age of information sharing is over.

The problem is that escaping data collection will often be seen as ambiguous, politicized or very complicated, so you can't even justify it morally, you have to consent. I'm a little worried because because at some point you could have cyber activists that could resort to "cyber-terrorism" to attack companies that do data collection, and show it to the public. Sending users their own data would be one way to stain the image of those companies. Ironically, terrorism justified data collection.

I don't think people realize how they are controlling their flow of thought and what they say when they know it can be heard. How many times I thought about what I was writing, knowing its trace could land somewhere that could have consequence on my image.