[HN Gopher] I was let go for refusing to deploy a dark pattern
___________________________________________________________________
I was let go for refusing to deploy a dark pattern
Author : codingclaws
Score : 506 points
Date : 2021-06-25 11:47 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.peachesnstink.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.peachesnstink.com)
| yoursunny wrote:
| In 2007, I had a script on my website that records every click
| and every mouse move. When my classmates are reading my webpages,
| I'm watching a video simulation of their mouse moves.
|
| My website doesn't contain any textbox, so there's no personal
| data except IP address. Nevertheless, I more or less know who's
| reading my page because every student has a static IP.
|
| Nowadays, I don't collect mouse moves anymore, but I have
| navigator.sendBeacon() for video playback behavior.
| codegeek wrote:
| You just described Tools like HotJar.
| slumdev wrote:
| Congratulations. Getting fired for doing the right thing might
| hurt in the short term, but it's the right thing to do and
| eventually (perhaps already) becomes a great story to tell.
| edgeform wrote:
| "Employee surprised when they wouldn't perform their work duties
| and were let go because of it."
|
| We get it, you personally think dark patterns are here to destroy
| humanity. Lesson learned, don't shit where you eat. There's a lot
| I don't like about my work too but I'm not about to risk my
| stability just to make a point to some people on a blog post.
| polynomial wrote:
| > They had no version control.
|
| In my mind this gives me some relief that the company was a small
| outlier, which is not to say I don't think there's a problem
| here, which is that morally objecting to work assignments doesn't
| seem to be a thing in the corporate world.
| surround wrote:
| A bit off-topic, but does anybody have any examples of websites
| which use this dark pattern? I am interested in trying to disable
| this "feature" client-side for the sake of privacy.
| henriquez wrote:
| You could disable JavaScript, otherwise there's no general way
| of preventing this type of behavior -- as far as I can imagine
| there are too many different ways of scooping up user input
| data to generally block via a browser add-on.
| jefftk wrote:
| Once you have entered your email address on a page with JS and
| the page has sent any additional network traffic, you have to
| assume that the server has your email address if they want it.
| JS is just too complex to offer any other guarantees.
| TX0098812 wrote:
| + karma
| gameswithgo wrote:
| Many years ago I was asked about adding a feature to our website,
| which was a shopping portal for eyeglasses, that would bring up a
| popup when the user tried to leave the site. I immediately said I
| would not do it. I didn't get let go but the look the manager
| gave me was one of shocked disbelief, I imagine it was strike
| one. I quit not long after. The manager was from a big
| corporation (Luxottica) that had bought us recently. It seems
| relatively normal that the kind of people who achieve positions
| of power at large companies just have no respect for other
| humans. It makes me sad sometimes.
| scotcha1 wrote:
| there's probably a lot more context, but this is a pretty
| common marketing feature
|
| some examples:
|
| https://github.com/carlsednaoui/ouibounce
|
| https://www.hubspot.com/products/marketing/exit-intent
|
| i like how this page describes them more as 'needy' than
| 'dark', since dark seems to imply immoral
|
| https://www.nngroup.com/articles/needy-design-patterns/
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| I was curious how that works, so I clicked into the ouibounce
| repo and read the README. I still don't get how it works, but
| I enjoyed how they flirt with self awareness:
|
| > it's very easy to create something spammy-looking.
|
| ...and then they list "good" uses that are... all spammy.
| nitrogen wrote:
| _I still don 't get how it works_
|
| These actions can be used to infer possible intent to
| leave: scroll up (to reveal address bar on mobile), move
| mouse toward top of viewport (to move mouse toward address
| bar), swipe down (to reveal address bar on mobile), loss of
| UI focus, probably others.
|
| I hate these patterns, and they are 100% appropriately
| described as dark. I and the other devs spent months at one
| place arguing with a PM about how janky and broken the
| third-party intent-to-leave detector they injected using
| Google Tag Manager without dev involvement made our app
| feel. (GTM was the product that convinced me Google gave up
| on not being evil)
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Okay, so it's all indirect? I usually just ctrl-w, and
| beyond the browser native dialog that sites can use to
| ask if you want to confirm saving your work or something,
| I wasn't aware of any way to intercept that or do
| anything about it.
| claudiulodro wrote:
| The most common way those exit-intent popups work is to
| check for when the users' mouse leaves the viewport e.g.
| https://stackoverflow.com/questions/923299/how-can-i-
| detect-...
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| Not to play devil's advocate here, but as an employee if you
| refuse to do something your manager tells you to do that is
| both within your job description and not illegal then you are
| in the wrong in terms of your duties as an employee.
|
| The feature you describe is annoying (I think it's fair to say
| that everyone hates these pop-ups) but rather innocuous and
| certainly not unlawful so there isn't any reasonable ground to
| refuse to do it if you're employed as a web dev.
|
| That's the nature of employed work.
| Sodman wrote:
| Conversely, if you work for a company that lists it's
| "values" as something like "Being customer-focused", it's
| easy to find ground upon which to push back on things that go
| against the company's supposed values.
|
| Software engineering is largely think-work. Some of it is
| creatively coming up with ways to solve novel technical
| problems, but an often understated part is thinking about how
| your implementations will affect your users, and optimizing
| for solving your _users_ problems.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| That's all nice but quite irrelevant to my previous
| comment's point.
| ticviking wrote:
| Quite the opposite. If a middle manager tells you to do
| something you think harms the company or it's customers
| and you don't push back as a knowledge worker you're not
| doing your job.
|
| Ultimately you may need to comply if the decision is
| made, but they literally hire us for our judgement and
| ability to work independently for the companies
| objectives.
| elihu wrote:
| The concept of professional ethics exists as is well
| established in other fields such as medicine, engineering,
| legal work, and journalism. Why should software development
| be regarded to take place in an ethical void?
|
| Granted, if you refuse to do something your boss tells you to
| do because it violates your concept of professional and
| personal ethics, they may decline to continue employing you.
| And you might not have a legal basis to challenge your
| termination if what they asked you to do is legal. But
| walking away from a job may be the best option in some
| situations.
| gameswithgo wrote:
| Oh I was ready to accept the consequences.
| arminiusreturns wrote:
| This comment only works with a very narrow definition of
| "duties of an employee".
| jessaustin wrote:
| _...something your manager tells you to do..._
|
| There's a principal-agent problem here. The owners of the
| company don't care about a random manager's feelings. The
| manager certainly does, however, so much of what any
| particular manager will require is more about making the
| manager feel better than about making profits. Other
| employees are correct to disagree with such misuse of
| resources.
| s_severus wrote:
| I work in e-commerce and this kind of thing is totally
| standard. You get salespeople trying to sell you this and much
| worse regularly.
|
| I was once pitched the exact dark pattern as in the OP - covert
| email collection. I was gobsmacked. I wrote about it at the
| time thus:
|
| > Towards the end of the slide deck, Dom excitedly explained
| how if a user enters an email address in any form field
| anywhere on the website, then regardless of whether the form is
| submitted, that email address will be captured by IntegriMart
| and paired up with a browser fingerprint for that user. This,
| presumably, allows us to "continue to build a dialogue" with
| that user.
|
| Full story for those interested:
| https://www.michaelbromley.co.uk/blog/the-covert-opt-in/
| perfunctory wrote:
| > It's hard for people to understand or care about ethics in
| programming. One possible reason for this is that the issues are
| too nuanced
|
| Oh. "too nuanced". The author is too soft. Most probable reason
| is that business owners are assholes.
|
| EDIT: oh, and because most developers are spineless creatures not
| being able to stand up for their principles, unlike the author.
| If everybody really cared about privacy as they say they do we
| wouldn't have so many issues. I mean, _somebody_ is implementing
| all those features.
|
| sorry for the harsh tone but I don't know how to say it any other
| way. When developers - professionals who enjoy royal treatment on
| the job market at the moment - are too afraid to upset their
| employers over an ethical question, it makes me mad.
| tut-urut-utut wrote:
| > EDIT: oh, and because most developers are spineless creatures
| not being able to stand up for their principles, unlike the
| author. If everybody really cared about privacy as they say
| they do we wouldn't have so many issues. I mean, somebody is
| implementing all those features.
|
| Why holding only developers responsible for non-ethical
| features? What about the actual decision makers and
| legislation.
|
| By the same logic, if only factory workers decided it's immoral
| to build weapons, there would be no wars. But those spineless
| creatures just want bread on the table and don't care about
| world peace.
|
| The only way to avoid these dark patterns is a set of laws that
| punish them. The reason why we don't have such laws is that we
| as a society don't know and don't care. It's we all, not only
| "spineless developers".
| squiggleblaz wrote:
| > By the same logic, if only factory workers decided it's
| immoral to build weapons, there would be no wars. But those
| spineless creatures just want bread on the table and don't
| care about world peace.
|
| I think the question is, are developers engineers or just
| programmers? The responsibility of an engineer is to give
| pushback when it is deserved.
|
| As you say, the responsibility is on decision makers. But
| they care about the politics. They will try to make it look
| like you're on your own. But if you clearly demonstrate the
| mood of the company's employees, they will reconsider their
| position. The result will be compromise not capitulation but
| it's better for something to be better even if it isn't great
| yet.
| rytor718 wrote:
| I don't agree. Responsibility lies with the doer in this case
| -- the person who types the dark pattern into the code. If my
| manager tells me to slap my coworker, she's only barely to
| blame for demanding something dangerous and unethical. I'm
| the asshole if I do it.
|
| There's plenty of blame to go around. But at current, we
| really do have to do better as a community and refuse these
| requests far more often than we currently do.
| 3pt14159 wrote:
| There are many people that have made quiet choices and can't
| talk about them for numerous reason. NDAs for example, or, my
| favourite: Sometimes there is no defence for a certain type of
| technique. It's just something nobody thought to do but any
| company could do it, and yet nobody seems to realize it. There
| is this huge knowledge gap between software developers and
| almost all business owners.
| prophesi wrote:
| Our best bet for dark patterns to disappear is via legislation,
| not putting the onus on developers. The initial premise that
| everyone cares about privacy simply isn't true, and with the
| influx of developers in the job market, it's just a matter of
| finding someone with similarly lax ethics.
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| The saying "a sucker is born every minute" kindof applies
| here. Just because you and a majority of people care about
| ethics, doesn't mean every programmer does. And all it takes
| is one who doesn't for the company to be able to implement
| it.
|
| The free market only works to an extent, and harm to
| consumers is a valid reason for the government to step in.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Long ago in my career, I was asked to essentially cheat
| benchmarks. Our software was often benchmarked by third
| parties to compare the product's performance across
| competitors. Our product was not as good, so after
| squeezing in every legit performance improvement we could
| possibly find, I was eventually asked to write code that
| queries the application running, and if it was a known
| benchmark program, just drop expensive API calls in a way
| not very noticeable. This would produce incorrect, but
| fast, output but only for benchmarks. I told my manager
| respectfully that's where I draw the line. He said, that's
| totally OK, I kept my job and he just assigned someone else
| who didn't care about the ethics. Quit a few months later
| for this and other reasons.
|
| I'm a big believer in being part of the solution, not the
| problem, but there are always plenty of developers who
| don't care at all and are fine with "sure, boss, whatever
| you say, boss".
| foxtrottbravo wrote:
| You reminded me of a saying I've heard a while ago which
| May be roughly translated to "the mother of suckers is
| always pregnant"
| quesera wrote:
| I love these non-sequitur literally-mostly-correct-but-
| conceptually-totally-wrong translations of aphorisms and
| titles.
|
| One of my faves: in a Spanish-speaking country, an Ernest
| Hemingway book published (legal status unknown) in
| English, titled "Goodbye to the Weapons".
|
| Another: from a customer service rep in Southeast Asia:
| "If I am in your shoe..."
| kilburn wrote:
| The fact that legislation exists has done me wonders fending
| against dark patterns.
|
| Real example:
|
| Client> We want the "I agree" button checked by default
|
| Me> I'm not a lawyer, but I think this goes against the GDPR
| in that users must give their consent by action, not by
| inaction. I would advise to at least check with your lawyers
| first.
|
| Client> Oh! I'm so tired of those laws, we'll get back to you
| after checking.
|
| (a couple days later) Client> Yeah you were right, lawyers
| say we'd better leave it unchecked.
|
| I know that client very well. I would have _never_ been able
| to convince them on a morality argument.
|
| What's more, after a few interactions like the above now they
| don't bother going to the lawyers anymore. I just say "I'm
| not sure this is acceptable" and they immediately agree to
| whatever non-shady alternative I propose.
| danuker wrote:
| If OP's client is in the EU, then what was asked is already
| illegal.
| dylan604 wrote:
| >Our best bet for dark patterns to disappear is via
| legislation
|
| And what would the language you propose look like for this
| legislation that doesn't have loopholes, caveats, etc for
| people to get around once the lobbyists are done with it?
| wildrhythms wrote:
| Sometimes it comes down to a judge simply deciding "I'll
| know it when I see it."[1] I think the bigger problem is
| our judicial and legislative system doesn't have the
| periphery to fully grasp how vast and damaging of a problem
| dark patterns present.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it
| dylan604 wrote:
| Do judges have this kind of power any more? Thinking in
| terms of all of the mandatory minimums and what not that
| tie judge's hands in deciding cases.
|
| Judges being able to "know it when they see it" would be
| the only way "spirit of the law" type of legislation
| would work. Then you have the problem of Judge A in
| District 1 being much more lenient than Judge B in
| District 2. Not sure if that's a bad thing or not, just
| mentioning things.
| rkangel wrote:
| > And what would the language you propose look like for
| this legislation that doesn't have loopholes, caveats, etc
| for people to get around once the lobbyists are done with
| it?
|
| It already exists - it's called GDPR. It deals with the
| root cause of this design pattern which is collecting data
| about clients secretly. It's enacted in the EU and it's
| excellent. It's not perfect - there's still some oddities
| and extra work for implementers (and the 'accept cookies'
| on every page thing is a faff for users) but the overall
| effect is extremely positive.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| The GDPR is absolutely not enforced. I've reported this
| exact dark pattern to the ICO over a year ago and nothing
| happened.
| brewdad wrote:
| Lax enforcement is a separate issue from saying it's not
| possible to even write a useful law in the first place.
| Both are needed but the rules need to exist before we can
| even consider enforcement mechanisms.
| GavinMcG wrote:
| The knee-jerk reaction that writing good legislation is
| just _too hard_ seems to always come up. But it 's harmful.
| We don't need to have model language ready to ship just to
| be allowed to discuss whether an individual or collective
| solution is appropriate for the problem, and "you haven't
| perfected the details" is an unhelpful conversation
| stopper. It represents the worst kind of cynical
| resignation. In the long run, that's just as fatal to
| democracy as the lobbyists you're worried about, because it
| shows you've already given up.
| roenxi wrote:
| Writing good legislation is really easy. The issue is
| that the more power you concentrate in one decision
| making body (in this case, legislators) the more
| important the issues they deal with are.
|
| That consumes bandwidth, and means that these sort 'they
| should step in and decide how people write software!'
| ideas are going to get corrupted by pressure groups who
| want to use the power to achieve their own ends.
|
| If I have to vote for someone who is going to enact
| policy I actually want, and the trade off is they are
| shady on web implementation policy - I don't care about
| web policy that much. No-one does. The government can't
| possibly put out reliably good regulation on the range of
| topics that people want good regulation while that
| dynamic is in play.
| GavinMcG wrote:
| The government can't possibly put out perfect legislation
| in _every_ area, no. But it 's ridiculous to assume that
| everything is inherently corrupted and that there's never
| any hope. I mean, sure, _if_ every member of Congress is
| shady on web policy but shares your views on more
| important issues, then web policy falls behind. But that
| 's just your cynicism speaking - you've got no reason to
| think that web policy is automatically lacking support.
|
| The other fault in your model is that Congress actually
| delegates the vast amount of lawmaking to administrative
| agencies, who are equipped to deal with the less
| important issues. The FTC, the CFPB, or the FCC could all
| credibly claim some authority over dark pattern
| regulation, though I don't know enough admin law to know
| who would be most appropriate. Agency rulemaking isn't a
| perfect process either, but it doesn't have the
| concentrated power problem you're describing and it deals
| with _tons_ of lower-priority topics. Go read the Federal
| Register: https://www.federalregister.gov/
| dylan604 wrote:
| The knee-jerk reaction is a knee-jerk reaction to the
| thought that legisilation is the end all be all of a
| problem. Marijuanna legilisation in the early states made
| it so difficult that it was better to stay underground. I
| remember in California the pro-marijuana people were
| actually opposed to the rules as written and being voted.
|
| Talking is cheap. We've been talking. Most of the
| congress critters in office now do not understand most
| what's being legislated (if they've even read the full
| bill past the talking points). That's why most bills are
| actually written by lobbyist groups, and the congress
| critter just puts their name on it. Surely, there's
| nothing that could go wrong with that now is there?
| GavinMcG wrote:
| It's not the be-all-end-all but it's also not a knee-jerk
| thought. Legislation (and government) is _how we solve
| the collective action problem_. That 's what it's there
| for.
|
| Sure, individual developers should stop deploying dark
| patterns. Many many developers _do_ , though, and saying
| they shouldn't isn't going to change things. Change
| requires collective action, rather than expecting a huge
| number of developers to magically reorder their
| priorities. And unless you think a nationwide ad campaign
| is _more_ feasible, that means legislation.
| dylan604 wrote:
| >And unless you think a nationwide ad campaign is more
| feasible
|
| On a tangent, I wonder what the response rate of
| Facebook's nationwide ad campaign looks like. Not really
| sure what the point of Facebook's campaign is, but it's a
| really lame ass commercial. I hope they are paying above
| market rate for it too. Any laws being passed to regulate
| Facebook would immediately be suspicious to me wondering
| how much FB spent to write said legislation. Just like
| when the rules regulating TV owners could only own a
| certain percentage didn't make anyone actually sell
| anything. So many pieces of legislation are like this. I
| don't see "Don't be evil on the interwebs" regulations
| being any different. Maybe I'm cynical, maybe I'm too
| pessimistic, but it's not like I'm grabbing my hesitancy
| from air.
| squiggleblaz wrote:
| So the law is likely to get watered down. But what's a
| good goal? What would be an effective limitation on
| online advertising companies?
| dylan604 wrote:
| Wasn't trying to derail conversation into ad companies.
| Just used some examples on how laws aren't always about
| public interest, but more the interest of those being
| affected by the law so the effect is the least disruptive
| as possible.
| rsj_hn wrote:
| The knee-jerk reaction is running to the government to
| try to make whatever you don't like illegal. Which is
| getting more and more common. On college campuses it's
| getting more common for kids to call the police when they
| see something that offends them, including speech that
| offends them. They just assume that they have a right to
| a higher government power to make illegal whatever is bad
| in the world. That is the knee jerk reaction here.
|
| The idea that software patterns can be made illegal is
| just absurd, and goes against the early vision of the
| free software movement which recognized the most
| important thing was the freedom to write software, rather
| than the freedom to get a job writing exactly the
| software you think you should be writing, and the right
| to throw employers in jail if they fire you for not doing
| what you're told on the job.
| chriswarbo wrote:
| > The idea that software patterns can be made illegal is
| just absurd, and goes against the early vision of the
| free software movement
|
| The free software movement has never been about a
| libertarian, free-for-all, wild-west. In particular, it
| has always been about taking power _away_ from
| developers, and giving it to _users_ (e.g. see gnu.org
| /philosophy ).
|
| Whilst FSF, GNU, etc. don't advocate banning certain
| software (AFAIK), they're certainly not averse to
| government intervention for social good. GNU Taler is a
| good example: a cryptocurrency which offers anonymity to
| buyers, but sellers remain identifiable for tax
| collection.
|
| Also note that 'freedom 0' (freedom to run the software
| for any purpose) only requires that a license _itself_
| doesn 't impose restrictions on users. It's taken for
| granted that users are already restricted by _other_
| mechanisms. For example, a license with a clause like
| "the software must not be used to commit bank fraud"
| would be non-free, but that doesn't imply that the free
| software movement approves of bank fraud; simply that (a)
| in places where bank fraud is illegal, such a clause is
| redundant, and (b) in places where bank fraud is legal,
| such a clause would constitute a developer exercising
| unjust power over users.
| mjsir911 wrote:
| > The knee-jerk reaction is running to the government to
| try to make whatever you don't like illegal.
|
| The things I advocate the government to ban are things I
| believe are _bad for society_.
|
| I don't like ice-cream, but I don't advocate for an ice-
| cream ban because I don't believe ice-cream is tearing
| apart our society at the seams.
|
| Dark patterns are _bad for society_ , and prey on
| people's miscalculations and inefficiencies of our
| chemical-brains. In the same way that child labour came
| up because it was profitable short term, but it was
| decided against that it was still a bad thing for
| society.
|
| The government's job is to steer society to a better
| place, god knows we'll take it down a bad path left
| unsupervised.
| weeblewobble wrote:
| Personally, I just think specificity makes for more
| interesting discussion. It's easy to say "there oughta be
| a law" but it's kind of empty calories, intellectually.
| Responding with aggressive negativity to people asking
| you to be more concrete is a real conversation stopper.
| GavinMcG wrote:
| I don't mind a specific discussion. I react with
| negativity to two things: the expectation that the next
| step in the conversation can't happen without some
| fleshed-out perfected proposal, and the demand for
| _someone else_ to come up with that solution, rather than
| making a positive contribution oneself. The problem isn
| 't "asking you to be more concrete" because you can do
| that while avoiding those two negative contributions.
|
| For example, a response could have been:
|
| > How would you tailor that law? I have a hard time
| describing exactly what's wrong with dark patterns in a
| way I think would be enforceable, even though I know it
| when I see it.
|
| or
|
| > I think a law would have to be carefully written. One
| starting point might be requiring cancellation to be
| available using the same process as subscription - for
| example, if there's a signup form online, there must be
| an equivalent cancellation form.
|
| which are at least _contributions_ rather than just an
| insistence that there 's a problem that has to be
| addressed before these ideas can even be considered.
|
| Even just "what language would you propose?" without all
| the baggage of the original comment at least moves the
| discussion forward.
| dylan604 wrote:
| The conversation stopping seems to be the agenda of
| modern day. Nobody actually wants to solve issues,
| because then they can't argue on the issue any longer. So
| when the questions get tough, pivot, gas light,
| whataboutism, whatever to avoid getting pinned down.
|
| For actual furthering of the discussion on wording,
| something vague like 'any dialog presented to user must
| be done in the most consumer friendly manner' isn't very
| good because it's too vague. Getting specific like
| 'automatically checking/highlight/enabling the options
| vendor prefers' is too specific because then the vendor
| would use something not a check/highlight/etc. These kind
| of things are ripe for "spirit of the law"
| interpretations, but we've long since given up that kind
| of good intentions.
| prophesi wrote:
| I would guess that EFF would do the hard work of combing
| through the text, and sound the alarm if it has such
| glaring issues.
| shrimp_emoji wrote:
| >spineless creatures not being able to stand up for their
| principles
|
| Why assume they have principles?
| NaturalPhallacy wrote:
| >When developers - professionals who enjoy royal treatment on
| the job market at the moment - are too afraid to upset their
| employers over an ethical question, it makes me mad.
|
| I feel like a lot of people saying this lately haven't tried to
| get a job since the pandemic.
|
| Invitations to apply from recruiters whose job it is to get
| people in the door are not job offers, nor royal treatment.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > sorry for the harsh tone but I don't know how to say it any
| other way
|
| You shouldn't have to apologize. Nothing wrong with being
| harsh. We _should_ be harsh, especially with people who
| perpetuate these unacceptable practices. Indignation is a
| perfectly valid response when faced with this.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > When developers - professionals who enjoy royal treatment on
| the job market at the moment - are too afraid to upset their
| employers over an ethical question, it makes me mad.
|
| Sure, that's understandable.
|
| But to be understand it, also remember that when highly paid
| experts that get royal treatment so long as they conform
| confront employers over ethical issues...you get the Google
| Ethical AI massacre.
|
| "Royal treatment" isn't unconditional, and means you have a lot
| to lose.
| Silhouette wrote:
| _Most probable reason is that business owners are assholes._
|
| _Some_ business owners are. Some of us do try to run our
| businesses in ethical ways, despite knowing very well that we
| could probably make a lot more money if we included a dark
| pattern or two. It would be nice if people could at least not
| insult us while we 're doing it by lumping us in with the $$$
| crowd and normalising the bad behaviours we want to resist.
| teclordphrack2 wrote:
| There is a reason big tech likes to hire from abroad. While you
| do get added value from different countries and cultures you
| also get different morals and motivation.
|
| Another reason is that it is kind of hard to care about privacy
| when you need to send half your check back home to support
| extended family that is in poverty.
| Supermancho wrote:
| Experian's FreeCreditReport.com (in)famously, within the company,
| sells off your email many times IF THAT IS ALL YOU FILL OUT on
| the site.
| panic wrote:
| What are we, as an industry, going to do about our complete
| abdication of responsibility for taking care of people's personal
| data? It can't just be up to individuals installing protective
| browser plugins. What would a future where people have real
| privacy on their computers look like? And is there a way to get
| there from where we are now?
| president wrote:
| It can never happen because there is a never ending supply of
| people who will set aside ethics for personal gain. I have
| worked for over a decade in the software industry in over 5
| different companies large and small and I have never once seen
| an example where a leader put ethics over profits. Most small
| businesses live or die based on their next sale and most large
| businesses need growth at any cost to legally satisfy their
| fiduciary obligations to their shareholders.
| BSVogler wrote:
| Lobby for something like GDPR. Half the stuff in this thread is
| illegal in the EU.
| josefresco wrote:
| Similar but not exactly the same...
|
| Zoominfo sells a tool that will "auto fill" visible or hidden
| form fields based on the user's initial input.
|
| https://www.zoominfo.com/solutions/formcomplete
|
| The tool is marketed specifically as a way to reduce the number
| of "visible" form fields.
|
| At least in this case, the user has to actually _submit_ the
| form.
| robocat wrote:
| Does Zoominfo get the browser to autofill a bunch of fields
| that are obscured from the user? Interesting...
| josefresco wrote:
| Yes. You can and are encouraged to make forms with just a few
| fields, and let Zoominfo auto-fill the rest.
|
| When my client made the initial request I responded with "I
| don't know if that's possible OR legal" and then a couple
| weeks later they sent me Zoominfo welcome emails and asked to
| integrate into their web forms.
|
| FWIW, my clients' forms actually display the fields (none are
| hidden) so I at least can sleep a little better at night.
| javajosh wrote:
| Good on you! At one point I thought I might want to be a product
| person at Google and interviewed for it. Their example product
| was a smartwatch for kids. I told them that I thought that I
| would object to that product on the basis that kids need fewer,
| not more screens. I was naive enough to think that this was a
| trick question but, needless to say, they passed.
|
| I'm still proud of my answer.
| jacobsenscott wrote:
| There are smart watches for kids, and as a parent I thought
| they were great (my kid is old enough for a phone now). They
| had a very limited set of features but my kid could call me or
| text me silly pictures anytime, and I could call him or text
| him back. And I could see his current location. They had
| terrible battery life though.
|
| But I'm not one of those parents who things screens are
| inherently bad anyway. I think you would be hard pressed to
| find any credible evidence to the contrary. I grew up on
| screens and now I have a good job as a programmer where I can
| provide a good life for my kids.
| jefftk wrote:
| I don't know, I'm considering one for my kids. The oldest is
| seven, and it would be great if they could go to the nearby
| park by themself. Kids watches that function as cell phones
| would work very well for this.
| ridaj wrote:
| ? You could've said that it doesn't have a screen. You could've
| said that it respects children's attention by not offering
| distractions on demand. It seems to me you can design a smart
| watch for children with these kinds of characteristics rather
| than opt out of the exercise altogether.
| javajosh wrote:
| Those discussions did happen, and I agreed that there was a
| niche possibility for a product targeted at parents of young
| children. Maybe. But they didn't want to talk about a niche
| product (it's Google, after all) and after thinking about it
| I didn't feel comfortable with the idea at any level - it
| trains kids and parents to be dependent on tech, trains kids
| it's okay to be constantly tracked, and while there are
| undeniable benefits, there are undeniable costs, too. The
| older the kid gets the more problematic it all becomes.
| m_mueller wrote:
| As a parent I've actually been thinking about this for a
| while. These watches are now very common btw, roughly half
| of the 7-9yo in the neighborhood have em. IMO ~9 should be
| the minimum age and the tracking should only be activated
| on press of an emergency button. I haven't yet found a
| product like that, they tend to give zero control to the
| kids. Aren't people concerned with their kids learning
| responsibility?
| MandieD wrote:
| I'd love to be able to give my kid something that's
| primarily an analog watch but with an "I'm lost/scared"
| button.
| JTbane wrote:
| Just get a flip phone with a prepaid call/text plan.
| polynomial wrote:
| I feel lost/scared just thinking about this world we have
| built, with all its perverse incentives.
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| A traditional 'dumb' phone seems to loosely fit this
| definition.
| gnicholas wrote:
| Can I ask where you're located? I'm in the heart of
| Silicon Valley and haven't seen this at all.
| m_mueller wrote:
| Switzerland. It's an expat heavy neighborhood, not sure
| whether that has an influence.
| ridaj wrote:
| I'm confused by "the older the kid the more problematic it
| all becomes"... Older kids eventually turn into adults. Do
| you mean that tech in general is bad for people?
| mapster wrote:
| Yet older kids are not adults, they are teens with lots
| of free time yet responsibilities that effect their
| future. If they've been groomed to have short attention
| spans and not curious by screens that play endless video
| and ads, it seems like a problem in the making.
| option_greek wrote:
| And they would probably have passed regardless. No
| distractions and screens probably means no ads and that's
| most likely a no no for the former do no evil company.
| handrous wrote:
| You forgot the other thing they love: humanity-scale
| dragnet surveillance (to feed "the algorithms"). If it can
| spy on lots and lots and lots of people, they might still
| be interested.
| ridaj wrote:
| I suspect that, with their bet on cloud in particular,
| they're hiring in many places where ads don't matter. Even
| in the mobile OS world, where ads is eventually where they
| make some of the money, they have a clear adoption
| challenge first...
| anshorei wrote:
| But how will you show the kids ads then?
| haliskerbas wrote:
| Haptic feedback when you get close to the right Cheerios
| box or Lego set. Some Pavlovian type stuff
| polynomial wrote:
| ok, this is the guy we want to hire.
| effingwewt wrote:
| I quite literally shivered in abject horror at the
| thought that some advertisng schmuck will read that and
| jump on it. We need to ban advertising.
| NaturalPhallacy wrote:
| You'd love The Santaroga Barrier by Herbert.
|
| I typed of this excerpt and have used it countless times:
|
| >To those men in their oddly similar dark suits, their
| cold eyes weighing and dismissing everything, the people
| of this valley were a foe to be defeated. As he thought
| of it, Dasein realized all customers were "The Enemy" to
| these men. Davidson and his kind were pitted against each
| other, yes, competitive, but among themselves they
| betrayed that they were pitted more against the masses
| who existed beyond that inner ring of knowledgeable
| financial operation.
|
| >The alignment was apparent in everything they did, in
| their words as well as their actions. They spoke of
| "package grab level" and "container flash time" -- of
| "puff limit" and "acceptance threshold." It was an "in"
| language of militarylike maneuvering and combat. They
| knew which height on a shelf was most apt to make a
| customer grab an item. They knew the "flash time" -- the
| shelf width needed for certain containers. They knew how
| much empty air could be "puffed" into a package to make
| it appear a greater bargain. they knew how much price and
| package manipulation the customer would accept without
| jarring him into a "rejection pattern."
|
| >*And we're their spies, Dasein thought. the
| psychiatrists and psychologists - all the "social
| scientists" we're the espionage arm.
|
| The Santaroga Barrier,
|
| Frank Herbert, 1968
| deckard1 wrote:
| > I would object to that product on the basis that kids need
| fewer, not more screens.
|
| The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun,
| beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can't. Not
| without your help. But you're not helping.
|
| Why javajosh? Why aren't you helping?
|
| Would it be too on-the-nose to point out that this hypothetical
| smartwatch would probably be running Android?
| matsemann wrote:
| I once was contacted by a recruiter from the company owning
| most of the big newspapers in my country. They were putting
| together a team to be the first in the region to make news
| tailored for the reader. I turned them down, and actually told
| them it was on ethical grounds. With how bubbly and divided the
| news landscape has become the later years I feel that was a
| good call.
| weeboid wrote:
| The bigger smell is no version control :D Saving emails
| `onBlur()` is probably not a dark pattern.
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| You're getting downvoted while being right. A dark pattern is
| tricking the user. Not saving the data they enter. But most
| people around here call anything that is distasteful a dark
| pattern.
| dharmaturtle wrote:
| > Dark Patterns are tricks used in websites and apps that
| make you do things that you didn't mean to, like buying or
| _signing up for something_.
|
| https://www.darkpatterns.org/
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| Yea it isn't tricking them into something. It's capturing
| data they've input.
| surround wrote:
| It is a dark pattern - it tricks the user into thinking their
| data won't be submitted until they click "submit," but
| instead saves it right away. It would only not be a dark
| pattern if the form clearly said "your email address will be
| uploaded to our servers immediately after typing it."
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| Why were they tricked into thinking that? OP didn't mention
| any text stating that. Lots of sites send updates
| constantly, I've never been tricked into thinking they
| didn't I just wasn't explicitly informed. Which is a
| difference.
|
| As I said, it is distasteful but not a trick.
| atum47 wrote:
| I have one comment about this: If a bridge or a building
| collapses they would go after the engineer who signed the
| project. Same with accountants and other professions. We should
| start holding tech companies and software engineers accountable
| as well. Is your software spying on people? Using dark patterns?
| Well, I think you should face the consequences of your actions.
| Software are as real as buildings or bridges now a days. Storing
| the users passwords as clear texts? Using admin:admin for
| credentials? Come on...
| nscalf wrote:
| I previously worked on couple of companies that flirted with the
| line on some of these dark patterns. As far as they go, this one
| is pretty benign. If I recall correctly, I was for doing this
| pattern. There is enough intent there (putting your whole email
| into the user form) that it really doesn't feel like abusing the
| user. That being said, me and my coworker had to fight back and
| refuse to build a few other dark patterns.
|
| The real issue is the legitimate companies that take it way past
| dark patterns. Credit rating bureaus that scrape 100% of your
| data and the data of anyone you've ever been near, Facebook
| stalking you across the internet, etc. As far as I'm concerned,
| if it's okay for Facebook to do this exact dark pattern on
| everyone in the world, I can make a stupid directory site have a
| little more juice.
| rytor718 wrote:
| I don't see how this is benign in any sense, but I may be
| missing something. If I type my email into a box on a website
| ...and decide a moment later NOT to press "Submit". My
| expectation is that my email was NOT saved to the server. I
| didn't consent.
|
| How is this pretty benign?
| whynaut wrote:
| It sounds like they mean relative to the stuff they were
| working on. Very colloquial.
| surround wrote:
| If it's "pretty benign" to save a user's email before they
| click submit, then it wouldn't be a big deal to inform the user
| that you just saved their email instead of trying to silently
| hide the fact.
| gccs wrote:
| I assume everything I enter into a form is recorded, even if I
| don't hit submit. I'm surprised they were listening to onBlur
| instead of onKeyPress. Partial information could be exploitable
| too.
| polynomial wrote:
| This hasn't been implemented by any teams I've been on. If
| companies were doing this, I believe (or at least hope) we
| would hear about it from implementors.
| nitrogen wrote:
| _I believe (or at least hope) we would hear about it from
| implementors._
|
| I was acquainted with some black hats in junior high and high
| school. Guessing how they are as adults, I'm pretty sure you
| can always find someone who will do it for the lulz, if not
| for the money.
| progmetaldev wrote:
| There are form builders out there where you have the option
| to record data as it is entered. It is simply a checkbox in
| the form builder.
| nice2meetu wrote:
| My wife hit this the other day. She entered her info on a
| website, gave up, and then got a polite email from them,
| something like: "Hey, we noticed you started filling in our form
| but didn't complete it, are you sure you don't want to sign up
| with us". She was furious, and we wrote a reply saying how
| unethical we thought this was. It was a small business (swim
| school I think).
| 3GuardLineups wrote:
| life must be beyond exhausting if thats enough to make your
| wife furious
| andybak wrote:
| Not enough information here to know if they made the right call.
|
| I can imagine situations where this is to the user's benefit and
| the company could handle the data ethically.
|
| Example: Situations where the user would be likely to have very
| unreliable connection and be on the page with the email field for
| some time with other data entered that they wouldn't want to
| lose.
|
| It might seem a bit contrived but I've had similar scenarios in
| the past.
|
| EDIT - as others mentioned localStorage is a better solution for
| this problem.
| benjaminjosephw wrote:
| Possibly beneficial and useful features can still be dark
| patterns. Whether or not there is any potential user-value is
| irrelevant to the ethics of design decisions like these.
|
| If you're dealing with user data you should never compromise a
| basic respect for that user's intent. Designing for implied
| consent where consent should be explicit (e.g. sharing personal
| data) is unambiguously a dark pattern.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| > Example: Situations where the user would be likely to have
| very unreliable connection and be on the page with the email
| field for some time with other data entered that they wouldn't
| want to lose.
|
| Data entered in a form don't require an active connection. If
| submitting the form fails you can resubmit it.
|
| Usually such issues start to appear when companies decide to
| implement their own custom UI from the ground up in a way that
| the result can only be described as undefined behaviour and
| things like input fields reset their state when you look at
| them the wrong way.
| gumby wrote:
| > Data entered in a form don't require an active connection.
|
| Such an important property of the web. Server sends a
| description of what it wants, client renders and handles
| interactions. Things like server side rendering are anti-web.
|
| Server-side rendering, streaming video, and such aren't
| incompatible with _internet_ philosophies in the slightest,
| just not aligned with the intent of the www. Apps, even the
| ones that aren't merely web views, are more www-like in this
| regard.
| danpalmer wrote:
| I think there's a very reasonable general expectation on the
| web that your data isn't used until you've clicked
| submit/save/etc. I don't think that this practice could be
| claimed to have "informed consent", even if the privacy policy
| mentions it explicitly.
|
| You're right there are places where this sort of thing can be
| useful, but they're rare, and could even be handled client-side
| in many cases.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| I think there's a very reasonable general expectation on the
| web that your data isn't used until you've clicked
| submit/save/etc
|
| I definitely have this expectation and would be angry if it
| was violated.
|
| I wonder: do non-engineers have this expectation? In 2021?
|
| I've been involved with web development since the more or
| less earliest days. Back when websites were mostly static
| pages, and eventually spouted some forms here and there.
|
| But, would a non-greybeard engineer have this expectation
| today now that UX is generally so different and "app-like"
| and anything you see in your web browser can basically be
| _assumed_ to be in constant communication with the server(s)?
|
| Please note that I don't think the current state of affairs
| is really an improvement. In fact, I more or less hate the
| "modern" web. I'm just curious about how user expectations
| have changed.
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| Then save it to local storage
| tgv wrote:
| Then you can't send them reminder emails, can you? No, this
| was pretty sleazy, and quite probably in violation of the
| GDPR.
| Kaze404 wrote:
| That's why LocalStorage exists.
| sixothree wrote:
| I know of a situation where someone refused to do something
| maybe 1/4th as shady as this. It sounded semi-reasonable to me.
|
| In this case, the boss simply assigned the task to someone
| else. Employee stayed employed.
| mwill wrote:
| Semi-related, not exactly a dark pattern put a job I bailed on
| early in my career for ethical reasons.
|
| I was hired to build a rudimentary tool for detecting nudity in
| images, over large datasets, as fast as possible/reasonable, with
| a pretty generous margin of error. The agreed pay was extremely
| good for the performance the client wanted.
|
| Not long after I started, after getting an advance payment, one
| of the clients called me and very tactfully broke the news to me
| that what they actually wanted was a tool that would detect women
| in bikinis, or showing lots of skin, and that they would be
| crawling social media and photo sharing sites, and their
| 'service' was a private premium forum that included a section
| where members could trade pictures of girls they knew, and they
| wanted to add a gallery of girls who post bikini pictures, with
| their real names and locations and links to their socials.
|
| I re-payed the advance that day, and it very much shaped my
| approach to consulting.
| sloshnmosh wrote:
| Scraping for bikini pics?
|
| Reminds me of this lawsuit against Facebook:
|
| https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-six4three-bikini-app-la...
| jacquesm wrote:
| Props to you.
| effingwewt wrote:
| Thank you for having the fortitude to put your money where your
| morals are. It's one thing to turn something down, it's another
| entirely to give up money already earned and the prospect of
| more to come.
|
| So, Thank you, for truly leading by example.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| You know what? I know that scraping is currently legal, but
| then we end up with things like that company or Clearview AI.
| We need some laws, ASAP, prohibiting data for being scraped for
| specific reasons.
|
| Also, I have some friends in insurance companies, and they say
| that the insurance companies right now are actively trying to
| learn how to scrape people's social media - secretly - so they
| can catch "dangerous" behavior or violations of their rules. My
| dad's client was telling how there was a guy who was running a
| happy hour secretly in his insured bar, and his company which
| scraped Facebook found posts from other people saying "great
| happy hour at this bar", he reported it to the insurance
| company, and they sent the bar the bill. That's freaky and
| should be illegal as a violation of privacy.
| Ueland wrote:
| [deleted, wrong post]
| dewey wrote:
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawoollacott/2019/09/10/link
| e...
| refulgentis wrote:
| I don't think it's freaky at all, I do find it freaky that
| there's people who will choose fraud over code as soon as
| code was anywhere in the loop that caught the fraud.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| Yes - because where does it end? China, which has
| surveillance on anything and everything? I _don 't want to
| live_ in a society where everything is monitored by people
| I don't know and haven't heard of secretly, and neither I
| think do you.
|
| Remember, this wasn't the insurance company that was
| spying. This was a data broker whom you've never heard of,
| who scrapes social media pages, and gets paid by insurance
| companies for reports. A bounty hunter using computers and
| scraping. That's dystopian.
| vagrantJin wrote:
| > Yes - because where does it end? China, which has
| surveillance on anything and everything?
|
| The anti-Chinese rhetoric on HN is starting to grate.
|
| You don't live in the DPRC. How do you know what China
| does with surveillance if any?
| alasdair_ wrote:
| > You don't live in the DPRC. How do you know what China
| does with surveillance if any?
|
| The same way we know what happened with the SS or the
| Stazi - lots of detailed evidence, first hand accounts,
| reports from other intelligence agencies etc.
| refulgentis wrote:
| Customers using their speech to praise your business, in
| the process revealing you committed fraud, and the
| insurance company hearing the customers, is not "China".
|
| If all this speech was in a central repository by
| government mandate, I agree it's China
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| It's more that I don't think it's the damn business of
| any private, nameless entity to scrape my social media
| posts and collect them in a secret database. I signed up
| for _Facebook_ and their privacy policy, not for
| anonymous people who can affect me in the real world
| without due process to save all of my posts and harvest
| information about me from them. And then link it to all
| of my profiles from LinkedIn and elsewhere across the
| internet into one central database they can sell people
| and my insurance company, because make no mistake that's
| what they do.
| sopooneo wrote:
| I think I get the tech side of this and how creepy it is to
| be caught that way. But what is nefarious or needs to be
| secret about a "happy hour"? Isn't that just a promotional
| event for bars/restaurants where discount food/drink sales
| for some period?
|
| Edit: Maybe I get it. It seems certain states have made it
| illegal to run "happy hours", presumably because people drink
| too much and behave badly.
| https://spoonuniversity.com/place/why-did-these-8-states-
| mak...
| SllX wrote:
| Even if it's not illegal in that State, it's also possible
| that the insurer deemed it to be a higher risk and would
| have just charged a higher premium.
|
| If the bar owner didn't want to pay that higher premium but
| did want to run a happy hour at his bar, and told the
| insurance company that he didn't have happy hours at his
| bar, then well, he lied to the insurance company. They
| could have found out another way, by sending a mook down
| the way, but this saved labor and expense claims, and maybe
| even on their own insurance bills if something happened to
| the mook in the bar during the happy hour.
|
| By the way, just pointing out another hypothetical here; we
| don't have sufficient information to be making judgement
| calls on that specific situation.
| extra88 wrote:
| In some places, like Massachusetts, happy hours (happys
| hour?) are illegal, I think the on the theory that they
| promote binge drinking.
| avz wrote:
| I am concerned that the type of defense of privacy
| exemplified by your argument (that reporting the happy hour
| to the insurance company was a privacy violation and should
| be illegal) will backfire sooner or later.
|
| Assuming that the guy was running a happy hour in a place
| where they are banned, your argument reinforces the view that
| privacy is only needed for those who break the law.
|
| Explaining why privacy is important is hard enough as it is.
| Please don't make it harder.
| yebyen wrote:
| God forbid people are happy for an hour, we've got to raise
| their insurance premiums. You know in Indiana, it's actually
| not even legal to have any happy hour promotions wherein the
| drinks are cheaper but only during a certain window. If you
| want to make people happy with drink specials, you have to
| offer them the same drink special all day long. (And so
| that's how we do...)
|
| Happy hour here is just when you can get a $2 cheeseburger,
| or $0.50 wings on special. I had never even considered
| something like a happy hour being reflected on your insurance
| premium.
| squiggleblaz wrote:
| > You know what? I know that scraping is currently legal, but
| then we end up with things like that company or Clearview AI.
| We need some laws, ASAP, prohibiting data for being scraped
| for specific reasons.
|
| I don't think there's anything about scraping that makes this
| disgusting. It would be equally bad if individual people
| uploaded compromising photos of their exes.
|
| The issue here is that people need control -- not ownership
| -- over their image and personal data/information. (The
| difference I intend to draw between control and ownership, is
| that the legal notion of control would be written in such a
| way that the fine print is irrelevant. Most online systems
| have some fine print somewhere giving the site owner certain
| rights over your content. Such fine print about a person's
| image needs to be rendered such a risk that if a business
| owner suggests including something like that to a lawyer, the
| lawyer starts quivering in their boots. "If I include such a
| clause, I will never get paid, because within half a
| nanosecond of it being visible you will be sued into kingdom
| come and your great grandchildren will still be paying off
| your debts."
| stickfigure wrote:
| > running a happy hour secretly in his insured bar
|
| Can you explain what this means and why it is a problem?
| --Confused
| grawprog wrote:
| Not OP, but a happy hour is usually a period of time when
| bars serve discounted drinks and such.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_hour
|
| It's illegal in several States. It was only made legal here
| a couple of years ago.
|
| >The reason for each ban varies, but include: to prevent
| drunk driving, avoid the nuisance to neighbors from loud
| crowds and public drunkenness, and to discourage unhealthy
| consumption of a large amount of alcohol in a short time.
| stickfigure wrote:
| I did not realize happy hours were so contentious. Call
| it the California bubble.
| grawprog wrote:
| Yeah, it was a big deal when they made it legal here.
| Bars, restaurants everywhere started doing them like
| immediately. Now it's rare to find a place that doesn't
| offer some kind of happy hour special.
|
| Gotta say, I haven't really noticed any of the problems
| occuring that the wiki article mentions was the reasoning
| behind most bans myself. Haven't seen any news reports
| about those things since the laws changed either or
| anything.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| That's a little bit symptomatic of your biases. Laws
| against happy hours are far more a bible belt thing in
| reality than a nanny state thing (even if some of the
| reasons touted publicly are nanny state-ish).
| thatguy0900 wrote:
| Happy hour is when drinks go on a huge discount for a set
| time period. You get a lot more seriously drunken people
| since it encourages binge drinking. I would assume that
| just carries a higher insurance premium to have one.
| fidesomnes wrote:
| I am trying to find the unethical part of this, care to
| enlighten us?
| ehutch79 wrote:
| You might actually want to get a psych eval if you can't
| figure out how that's unethical.
|
| This is not sarcasm, or me trying to be mean.
| fidesomnes wrote:
| Okay so you read 1984 as an instruction manual and not a
| warning. Cool beans.
| thehappypm wrote:
| Grabbing images of women from social media, and aggregating
| them without their consent, is not necessarily illegal, but
| it's certainly exploitative and creepy.
| wutbrodo wrote:
| This is just restating the question. "Exploitative and
| creepy" doesn't have a whole lot of semantic content beyond
| "wrong".
|
| I took a whack at articulating _why_ it's wrong while not
| quite fitting a clear definition of malfeasance here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27632365
| willcipriano wrote:
| The pictures are one thing and bad enough. Including
| location and links to profiles could make you a party to
| stalking or worse, and that is quite unethical.
| fidesomnes wrote:
| So gathering pictures on the internet is exploitive and
| creepy in your opinion. That is quite a leap of faith and
| I'll take your word that you are not concern trolling but I
| don't know where you have been the last 30-40 years.
| wutbrodo wrote:
| I disagree with this comment, but it's a shame (albeit an
| unsurprising one) that it's flagged into oblivion instead of
| responded to. I think the question illuminates something
| interesting about the incompatibilities between our pre-
| social-media notions of privacy and our current public
| posting behavior.
|
| I don't have my beliefs on the topic clearly articulated, but
| I'll give it a crack. There's the argument that public
| information is public, and that there's no issue in
| aggregating it or otherwise making it more accessible, as
| long as the access is through legitimate means. I'm
| sympathetic to this and understand why people believe it, but
| I think it contradicts other consensus moral intuitions about
| privacy rights. A salient example that other HNers may be
| familiar with is the doxxing of Scott Alexander; any
| intellectually honest person familiar with the internet can
| tell the difference between "you can find out who he is if
| you do some digging" and "real name published by the NYT",
| despite the pathetic attempts at dismissing the possibility
| that doxxing him was bad (amusingly, including by people who
| I am 100% sure would find the bikini example to be a horrible
| violation). Hell, I was a reader of Scott's for years before
| I first came across his real name. The entire social Internet
| is built on security through obscurity, because opsec is hard
| and many people aren't constantly vigilant.
|
| There's even precedent for these intuitions outside of the
| social media context. It's uncontroversially okay for
| someone's face to show up in your photo taken in public; once
| you've taken it, nobody cares if you study the guy in the
| background. However, aggregate and operationalize this, and
| it changes not just in degree, but in character: It's
| practically a trope in thrillers for universal CC cameras +
| alphabet-agency elbow grease to stitch together comprehensive
| tracking of an individual, and the public is rightfully a
| little creeped out by the thought.
|
| The main difference here is that technology, as always, is
| democratizing the ability to do this, pushing the threat
| model from the unrealistic "NSA spends huge resources to
| track you" to the prosaic "facial recognition can just track
| and store everyone's movements at low cost" (or "some under-
| the-radar shop is aggregating your bikini shots") and a
| million other mundane violations of our moral intuitions. To
| my mind, we're in the uncomfortable period before a new norm
| equilibrium is reached that matches the technological
| context. This has already happened locally: I'm sure this
| group knows people who have good opsec since the early 2010s,
| and "treat everything you post as if it's public" is at this
| point an age-worn piece of wisdom.
| Tainnor wrote:
| > I'm sympathetic to this and understand why people believe
| it, but I think it contradicts other consensus moral
| intuitions about privacy rights.
|
| I mean, I guess that's the reason why it was downvoted,
| don't you think?
| wutbrodo wrote:
| "This is reasonable and illuminates something
| interesting, but I don't agree with it" is pretty widely
| considered a poor excuse for downvotes without comment,
| let alone flagging. You're obviously free to downvote
| whatever you want, but behaving like that is explicitly
| making this a meaner, dumber, less interesting place.
| Tainnor wrote:
| I should have quoted only the latter part of your
| sentence. I disagree that it's an illuminating comment or
| that the reasoning behind it is strong. And in
| particular, "I disagree with it" is not in the same
| category as "most reasonable people consider this to be
| immoral" (you can question whether we have the same
| definition for "reasonable", but at some point you'll
| have to recognise that we all make some decision at some
| point as to what we consider reasonable or not).
|
| That said, I didn't actually downvote it, I just gave
| some argument for why I think the downvote was justified.
| hughrr wrote:
| That sounds about right. I was interviewed for a fairly well
| known company on contract a number of years ago. I was told the
| product was top secret and it was going to be amazing etc etc.
|
| So roll in on first day after signing up to fuck knows what and
| it was a ticket touting company. I listened to their pitch
| which lasted until lunch, went and got myself a sandwich, sat
| on a bench and thought "fuck it, this is wrong" and just went
| home.
|
| When I told the agent he went crazy at me because I'd burned
| his commission. Gave them the finger too. In some places it's
| bastards all the way down.
|
| Next time someone pulled that on me, I cut the interview off
| and only worked for predefined work for a number of years. If
| something is off grid on your contract, no is the answer.
| sbarre wrote:
| For anyone wondering (I had to look it up):
|
| ticket touting = ticket scalping.
| jacobsenscott wrote:
| What's unethical about ticket scalping?
| pao wrote:
| Come on, man.
|
| Remember those guys last year who would drive around
| buying up all the masks, selling them online for 10x? You
| don't know why everybody hated them? This is why:
|
| The original seller has a reputation to protect and
| doesn't want to be seen as taking advantage. Maybe it's a
| musician who would rather sell to kids who are willing to
| wait in line than to whoever has the most money. Maybe a
| pharmacy selling masks in 2020. The arbitrage opportunity
| is for somebody with no reputation or scruples, who
| chooses to see themselves as just an Angel of the Free
| Market. To everyone else, he's a jerk.
| Causality1 wrote:
| Is there anything _not_ unethical about ticket scalping?
| Tickets being non-essential entertainment is the only
| reason it 's legal.
| neitherboosh wrote:
| Fans who really want to see their favorite artist/sports
| teams get extorted, and the money goes to scalpers
| instead of the artists and venues which are actually
| providing value. Scalpers provide no value to society.
| randomraccoon wrote:
| Planet Money has done an excellent episode on this - http
| s://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/06/25/195641030/epis.
| ... While I broadly agree with this, I would say that
| scalpers can actually provide a service of exchanging
| money for time and convenience. For example, you may have
| a free or cheap concert that sells out extremely quickly,
| but with scalpers, those with lots of money can always
| get a ticket. Much of the economy is built on the similar
| concept of arbitrage, where someone buys something
| cheaply and sells it for a markup to those who lack the
| ability or knowledge to get it from the seller's source.
|
| That said, scalpers in particular seem to cause a whole
| lot more harm than good in general. As the above podcast
| addresses, it's a very difficult problem to solve
| systemically if you are intentionally undervaluing your
| goods.
| ketzo wrote:
| > For example, you may have a free or cheap concert that
| sells out extremely quickly, but with scalpers, those
| with lots of money can always get a ticket.
|
| But how do you square that with scalpers _causing_ the
| tickets to sell out so quickly? I mean, they 're the ones
| creating their own market. They're not really providing a
| service if they're the ones creating the annoying _need_
| for the service in the first place.
| summm wrote:
| Then just don't pay the inflated price and don't go to
| the event?
| swagasaurus-rex wrote:
| Sounds like an oxymoron. Like hoarding toilet paper,
| gasoline, water during times of emergency, it limits the
| true supply.
|
| You could argue the "true price" is what the scalpers
| charge (who will stop drinking water when the prices
| skyrocket?).
|
| But in reality they squeeze the supply to create
| artificial scarcity. Any economist knows this is market
| manipulation.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> What's unethical about ticket scalping?
|
| It artificially inflates ticket prices by inserting a
| completely unnecessary middle-man in the purchase
| process. This is done by people with no intent to
| actually use the tickets they bought, so it's very much
| not the same as "oh I can't go would you like to buy my
| ticket?"
|
| This is similar to a dark pattern I've seen at shopping
| malls where they offer a valet service, but also rope off
| all the close parking spaces for valet. This creates an
| artificial scarcity of close parking spaces which helps
| to drive the valet business. If they never did this there
| would be little desire for the valet service.
| dmd wrote:
| Yeah, that makes no sense. Valet should use the farthest
| spaces possible.
| ydlr wrote:
| > >> What's unethical about ticket scalping?
|
| > It artificially inflates ticket prices by inserting a
| completely unnecessary middle-man in the purchase
| process. This is done by people with no intent to
| actually use the tickets they bought, so it's very much
| not the same as "oh I can't go would you like to buy my
| ticket?"
|
| I think this is called "retail."
| ratherbefuddled wrote:
| Retailers are generally providing a service. Somewhere to
| go and look at and try out a product, many products
| conveniently under one roof. Scalpers / touts are not,
| they are parasites.
| ydlr wrote:
| I agree. I just find it amusing that similar behavior can
| be viewed so differently depending on context.
|
| There is nothing inherently wrong with middlemen
| asserting themselves into a transaction. Our whole
| economy depends on it.
| akiselev wrote:
| Retailers are also have strict liability for the products
| they sell. When something goes wrong, it is up to them to
| make customers right and go after the manufacturer to
| recover those damages.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Retailers are also have strict liability for the
| products they sell. When something goes wrong, it is up
| to them to make customers right and go after the
| manufacturer to recover those damages.
|
| That's sonewhat misleading about how chain-of-commerce
| strict liability works. The injured party can sue any/all
| parties in the chain of commerce directly, its not that
| the retailer is exclusively directly responsible, and
| then they have to work up the chain.
| ehutch79 wrote:
| Not really, as scalpers insert themselves between a
| retail ticket vendor, and the consumer.
| fennecfoxen wrote:
| > It artificially inflates ticket prices
|
| On the contrary, it _naturally_ inflates the price.
|
| Tickets that can be scalped were priced at below what you
| might naively consider "market" prices. The purchasers
| gain some value from this, and usually the sellers do too
| -- often in the form of hype, perennially useful for
| promotional purposes. Someone who scored a hard-to-get
| ticket for a good price is likely quite excited about it.
|
| But the difference means there is a strong incentive to
| turn the difference into cash, and even with inefficient
| processes in the middle, that incentive is substantial.
|
| You can of course spend all day saying it's "wrong" and
| it's a position you are welcome to take; there are
| interesting questions we could ask about who should
| rightly "own" abstractions like the hype, and why, but it
| is not protected by normal property law, and if property
| rights don't exist or aren't enforced then you know that
| the necessary conditions for free-market efficiency do
| not exist.
|
| But again, it's as _natural_ as any other economic
| effect.
| ska wrote:
| > But again, it's as natural as any other economic
| effect.
|
| Often I hear people supporting scalping as an example of
| a free market working, and I get that argument.
|
| The problem is the market that actually exists is
| anything but free, and largely based on deceptive
| practices and even outright collusion, which is I think
| what is what a lot of people really object to.
| bun_at_work wrote:
| How is the price inflation natural? The supply-demand
| relationship is unnaturally muddled with when someone
| restricts supply by purchasing all the tickets at once,
| especially with automated tools average consumers don't
| have/use. They then just resell the tickets - not at some
| supply-demand balanced value, but at their determined
| value, often 200%+ the original price.
|
| Supply is already fixed on things like tickets anyway,
| due to venue sizes, so this is just further restriction.
| It's not natural.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| I'm not a particularly big fan of Kid Rock, for a number
| of reasons. But he and a few artists had started doing
| things to thwart scalpers.
|
| Namely, he'd announce tours slowly. And basically the
| strategy was that as scalpers bought out shows, he'd add
| another show in the same city. And keep doing that until
| there was no demand, no resale market, so scalpers were
| forced to sell at face or near face value. "I can keep
| throwing dates at you, and you're paying for the seats,
| so it doesn't hurt me, but no-one will buy them from
| you".
|
| Eventually the scalpers learned to not, or minimally
| resell his tickets.
| hughrr wrote:
| That's pretty funny actually.
| Malician wrote:
| I mean, the enabling principle behind scalping is that
| demand is more than supply but supply does not increase
| to match. More people want the tickets than there are
| tickets, scalping means it's based on cost instead of who
| you know or how much time you're willing to spend or how
| lucky you get.
|
| This doesn't just solve scalping, this fixes the lack of
| supply of tickets which allows scalping to exist
|
| edit: I'm not sure I completely stand by this. There are
| various good reasons to sell tickets for cheaper than the
| maximum price you could and still sell out. Still, it's a
| harder problem to solve than it looks
| orangecat wrote:
| _They then just resell the tickets - not at some supply-
| demand balanced value_
|
| It is the supply-demand balanced value. If it wasn't,
| they wouldn't be able to sell them.
| bravura wrote:
| Playing devil's advocate: In a market where value is
| signalled by scarcity, creating artificial scarcity
| creates artificial value.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> Tickets that can be scalped were priced at below what
| you might naively consider "market" prices.
|
| Maybe. The scalpers are taking a risk buying tickets they
| may not sell, so it might serve as a mechanism to find
| the market price for the tickets. OTOH it also creates
| artificial scarcity which artificially raises the price.
|
| In the end, the scalper is inserting themself into a
| transaction between two parties that didn't ask for them
| to do so and were mutually satisfied with the situation
| prior to that (nothing changed for the seller, and I
| think most buyers would appreciate the lower price).
| atkailash wrote:
| On a mass scale like this it makes it impossible for real
| people who actually care and could have an experience of
| their lives get a ticket.
|
| If it's Joe Martini on the corner trying to sell his
| extra ticket to Phantom of the Opera, it's really no big
| deal imo
| matt74827289 wrote:
| People tend to not like scalping of any products, it
| raises the price of the product while adding little to no
| value. The hate towards scalping is quite visible in the
| GPU market due to its limited supply
| [deleted]
| mjburgess wrote:
| It's a weird one.
|
| Events should auction off a percentage of tickets, and
| reserve a percentage "for fans" -- and all fixed to a
| name & photo id.
|
| One has to suspect that many events are in-cahoots with
| scalpers, and are just pricing their tickets below the
| market for PR reasons.
| sbarre wrote:
| > all fixed to a name & photo id
|
| You're not the first to think of this I assure you.
|
| Most modern scalper platforms collect your credit card
| and personal info in advance and use it to buy your
| ticket with their bot. So even if the venue is matching
| purchase info to your ID and credit card, it all lines
| up.
|
| Scalpers aren't hawking tickets on show night 200 feet
| from the venue on the sidewalk anymore.
|
| You pre-buy through them to guarantee that you'll get the
| ticket you want since everything sells out super fast
| (because of scalpers!) and you pay the markup for that
| service.
| etripe wrote:
| > Each file had the same change - they had added code that makes
| an ajax saveEmail() call onBlur. In other words, email addresses
| were being saved to the database when a user inputs an email and
| the input loses focus.
|
| > I told my client - apologies, but I don't want to work on this
| task because it's a dark pattern. And they reply - no, no, we are
| just sending people 3 email reminders. And then I try to explain
| that it's basically saving email addresses secretly.
|
| Perhaps because this is a short post, but it seems to be missing
| context. The email addresses are saved, which may or may not be
| questionable. It's unclear whether there are any mechanisms to
| auto-remove the email addresses once three reminders have been
| sent.
|
| It doesn't seem immediately obvious what the dark pattern is
| here. What am I missing?
| 3pt14159 wrote:
| Users expect forms to submit when the click the button. If they
| change their mind about signing up or purchasing something,
| they don't expect to get emailed if they didn't click the
| button. That's the dark pattern. Not the worst I've seen, but
| not great either.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| Exactly. I've been a victim of a dark pattern like this years
| ago when I was trying to find mortgage rates.
|
| Many of the online mortgage rate tools are really just lead
| generation sites, including some of the big name brand ones.
|
| One wanted me to create an account, and I got about half way
| through (I stupidly gave my phone number) and then exited
| without creating account. I believe they had a sort of "enter
| email, next. enter phone, next" kind of page by page pattern.
|
| Anyway, within an hour of exiting I was getting 3 phone calls
| per hour from mortgage companies soliciting me for business.
| josefresco wrote:
| "abandoned cart" technology is why many ecommerce websites
| ask for your email _first_ when checking out. My kid
| recently added some items to an online shopping cart to
| determine shipping rates, which required their email, and
| now they get spammed incessantly.
| MandieD wrote:
| Switching to FastMail and the easy availability of
| arbitrary-business-name@mydomain.com was worth it just
| for that.
| eloff wrote:
| But how many people enter their full email and then back out
| of the form? This seems like a small thing at the end of the
| day, especially for 3 emails that doubtless contain an
| unsubscribe link.
|
| Edit: That got a lot of push back. I'm just saying, this is
| not the hill I'd die on. At best it would spare some small
| single digit percent of visitors 3 unwanted emails.
| HumblyTossed wrote:
| Probably an awful lot for them to want to pay a developer
| to do this.
| slver wrote:
| By that logic let's monitor their clipboard for email and
| phone numbers. Let's tell them that they should enable
| notifications so we verify they're not a robot. Let's ask
| them to download a little executable to see if we can find
| helpful ways to reach them.
|
| We'll provide an unsubscribe link, I promise.
|
| ... But let's just record they clicked unsubscribe because
| that means they're engaged. I mean maybe they clicked in
| error? Let's ask them to confirm.
|
| ... But maybe they confirmed because they were confused and
| didn't understand the great value we provide.
|
| We can beat around the bush our way to full-blown scammers
| all day.
|
| Saving emails from a form NOT submitted is bullshit, and
| you know it. The user never intended to submit.
| slver wrote:
| > But how many people enter their full email and then back
| out of the form?
|
| Most people. Because we have form autofill.
| zentiggr wrote:
| And if I fill out most of the form, but some custom BS UI
| chunk can't play nice and borks the page... I'm done with
| "company", leaving the page since it never finished
| loading, but my email address is already saved?
|
| Absolutely f*ing not. Not a small thing in any way. This is
| unethical and if I got an email from that company you can
| bet I'll push back.
| dboreham wrote:
| We found a new kind of psychopathy test here.
| ipython wrote:
| In that case, why implement the feature at all?? Why die on
| the hill to capture email addresses from the "small single
| digit percent of visitors" who never consented to receive
| your spam in the first place?
| raxxorrax wrote:
| Really?
| rpdillon wrote:
| This is about control: does the user understand when the
| data leaves their hands and is given to another? If the
| user doesn't understand this, then they find themselves
| unwittingly giving out their personal information, not just
| to legitimate actors, but also malicious ones.
|
| I think this is a pretty important thing to try and get
| right.
| dahart wrote:
| I'm sure you meant your question sincerely. FWIW, I have
| backed out of many signup forms, and often wondered/worried
| whether they were doing exactly what the OP talked about.
| The reason for back-outs is because there is another very
| common dark pattern this gets combined with: a multi-page
| signup where email is asked for early, and then something
| more onerous is requested on a later page, which is where
| the cancellation is much more likely to occur. The single
| biggest reason in my experience for late cancellation is
| when the signup asked for a credit card, even though the
| signup was advertised as free. It's a bait and switch, and
| the deal ends up being a subscription that you can cancel
| after your first free day/week/month. I've had other things
| besides credit cards, though, like required personal
| information.
| eloff wrote:
| Yes, I can see your point. If you click through to the
| next step though, you should assume that submitted the
| form. Regardless of whether it was done through an old
| school POST or Ajax in a single page app.
|
| I think it's still a dark pattern to email someone who
| hasn't expressed interest in receiving those emails.
| There should at least be text informing you of that and
| giving a way to opt out up front.
| dahart wrote:
| Yeah, exactly, it's about expressing interest,
| communicating intent, and offering a way to opt out. The
| broader point is that form submission is not the criteria
| for saving an email address at all, explicit consent from
| the user is. When the site itself provides an expectation
| that a signup process can be "cancelled" they are
| signaling an expectation that the information will be
| discarded and not used to market to you or sell your
| email address to other companies. When they do that
| despite having communicated to you that the process was
| cancelled, they're playing dirty. And I do think selling
| the email address to third parties is the bigger danger
| here, not getting a couple of direct marketing emails
| from site you visited.
| JustResign wrote:
| Small things can still be unethical.
| Phenix88be wrote:
| It's not out of the form. It's out of the email fields. So
| if you press tab to go to the next field, the email is send
| somewhere without notice.
| [deleted]
| whalesalad wrote:
| The dark pattern is capturing an email address even if someone
| doesn't submit the form. Imagine you start a guest checkout,
| type your email address and nothing more, then close the
| window. That email would still get captured for marketing
| purposes. Because this isn't what a user would expect, it's
| considered a dark pattern.
| leephillips wrote:
| And the browser's autofill may fill in the email address
| without the user intending to, conceivably.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| Or, conceivably, the wrong email address. I'm sure I'm not
| the only person who has multiple, context-dependent email
| addresses that (in some cases) are email aliases I share
| with others, all saved with appropriate supplemental
| information in my browser.
| dev_tty01 wrote:
| For me, this is only ok if at the top of the form there is big
| easy to read text that says any data typed in the form is saved
| immediately prior to the user hitting submit. Anything else is
| a dark pattern.
|
| Let's not kid ourselves. We know most users naively think the
| data is just on their screen and nowhere else until they hit
| submit. If we write code to circumvent that expectation we know
| it is a deception. After all, the default behavior is that the
| form data is not available early. The programmer has to
| explicitly do something to counter the default.
| deepsun wrote:
| Well, if email was saved secretly, as author wrote, it means
| users were not aware of that their personal info is saved.
| Also, since it's Javascript, it means that they weren't first-
| party, who had the email address anyway.
|
| If they added a text for user like "Your email address is saved
| by XXX Inc, we will just send you 3 reminders", then it would
| be ok.
|
| For example of the same dark pattern: if you look at any hotel
| booking page (not aggregator like booking.com, but hotel-
| owned), I bet you will see at least 5 third-party tracking
| scripts, they all store every action you make on the page
| without user explicit knowledge.
| dahart wrote:
| > If they added a text [...] then it would be ok.
|
| I'd agree with that as long as the text is visible _before_
| entering the email address, and the text also mentions that
| email will be saved _before_ completing the form.
|
| > I bet you will see at least 5 third-party tracking scripts
|
| Analytics and tracking scripts is a good point. Sometimes
| it's implemented in a way where tracking scripts don't have
| access to keystrokes, for example by iframing them, and you'd
| hope that the web site owner would care enough about their
| own security to do that. But you're right that unfortunately
| it's common. In this case I think we need some legal
| protection in the US and elsewhere similar to GDPR that
| clarifies that collecting such information can only be done
| with explicit consent.
| kube-system wrote:
| 5 is pretty low. There are many popular websites that share
| data with >100 third-parties.
| [deleted]
| iovrthoughtthis wrote:
| would it be surprising to a user if they received an email from
| a company they hadn't given their email to?
|
| if yes, it's a dark pattern.
|
| if no, it's not.
|
| i side with, yes.
| slver wrote:
| It's not surprising because we're used to spam. /s
| danpalmer wrote:
| As long as this is done in a professional way, with a sincere
| effort from engineers to understand the business requirements, I
| think refusing to do things that constitute user privacy or
| safety issues is a good and right thing to do.
|
| Dark patterns are more borderline in many cases and I think the
| best approach is building a culture of respect for users that
| doesn't result in dark patterns, but in this case it looks to me
| like this was more than a dark pattern, it was an actual privacy
| violation.
| ehnto wrote:
| Dark patterns aren't a line in the sand that's for sure. At
| what point does a newsletter pop-up become a dark pattern?
| There are some concrete examples, but it can also be pretty
| nuanced. I think newsletter pop-ups are always egregious, but a
| business owner can have a very hard time grasping why. They can
| think they're building stuff people like, and they can often
| act like they're simply herding sheep. Users are ephemeral
| zombies to some, and from that lens, it's totally fine to
| capture them with sneaky tactics.
| potatosalad1 wrote:
| Newsletter popup that asks for email address and if you click
| Cancel or X doesn't save it: annoying but not a dark pattern
|
| Popup that asks for email address that doesn't have an 'x'
| (or the 'x' doesn't appear for a while) and the email address
| field secretly records what the user types and even though
| they clicked cancel their information was secretly shared:
| dark pattern
| ehnto wrote:
| There are some clear cut examples no doubt, but you've
| hardly covered the thousands of possible UX interactions.
| It's not always so well defined, partly because obnoxious
| marketing tactics can already toe the line of ethics.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > At what point does a newsletter pop-up become a dark
| pattern?
|
| At what point does it _not_? Pop-ups exist to steal
| attention. It 's abuse. Why do these marketers believe they
| are entitled to anyone's attention? They are not.
|
| > a business owner can have a very hard time grasping why
|
| Of course. Businesses generally couldn't care less about how
| much they're abusing their workers or their consumers. The
| only thing they care about is their profit. Dark patterns are
| just value extraction mechanisms, it's their abusiveness that
| makes them dark.
|
| > they can often act like they're simply herding sheep. Users
| are ephemeral zombies to some, and from that lens, it's
| totally fine to capture them with sneaky tactics
|
| Yes. It's an inherently abusive and sociopathic view. They
| don't consider us human beings.
| ehnto wrote:
| I am in agreeance by the way. I think perhaps my comment
| came across as trying to soften the seriousness of dark-
| patterns when really I was just trying to say that there
| are lots of different perspectives on different types of
| coercion. It's not that it's unclear when something is
| coercive, it's that it's unclear how much coercion and
| trickery is unethical, as it depends on who you ask.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > it's that it's unclear how much coercion and trickery
| is unethical
|
| Any amount of coercion and trickery is unethical. This is
| absolutely clear to me.
| hirundo wrote:
| I wouldn't call over aggressive marketing a dark pattern. As
| with the newsletter pop-ups, they aren't shady or underhanded
| or misleading or coercive, they're just in your face. I often
| find them obnoxious and repulsive and they drive me away from
| a site, but they're in the light, out in the open, not
| pretending to be something they aren't.
|
| I think there is a fairly bright line in the sand for
| defining a dark pattern, and the line is between hiding and
| being open, between being misleading and straightforward,
| between trying to force someone to do something and seducing
| them with plain intentions. The later behavior can still
| really suck, without being dark.
| ehnto wrote:
| I disagree, simply. There's so many novel UX patterns in
| websites and apps, it's impossible that you've got a clear
| idea of what is or isn't a dark pattern in every
| circumstance.
|
| Uber Eats used to have a "$0" option for tipping, but
| removed it, it's no longer clear if you're going to be
| giving a tip or not, but if you don't click anything you
| don't actually give a tip. Is that a dark pattern? I think
| so, because the UX makes it seem like you have to select
| something, and that no isn't an option. But it's not hard
| to argue in the negative, since doing nothing will not take
| money from you.
| whynaut wrote:
| You seem to give a pretty good reason why it's a dark
| pattern, and a pretty flimsy one for why it's not. I
| think it's not as ambiguous as you say.
| ehnto wrote:
| I didn't realize this was going to be such a
| controversial take. It's possible you think there's a
| clear definition because you haven't seen examples of
| what some industries think is ethical. I'm trying to pick
| relatable examples but clearly not doing a great job.
| Again, I tend not to think these things are ethical, but
| I'm not the ethics police, so the fact that one person
| thinks it's ethical and one person does not means it must
| be blurry.
|
| I feel pretty strongly that tracking cookies are evil,
| but the entire ad-tech industry did not think that was a
| dark-pattern.
|
| I feel pretty strongly that GDPR "accept all or leave
| site" dialogs are a dark pattern, but the EU is happy
| with that implementation.
|
| I would also love to point out that "dark-pattern" is
| still a blossoming terminology, there's no definitive
| body of law or ethics that describes what is and isn't a
| dark pattern.
| t0mas88 wrote:
| The "accept all or leave" has recently been ruled illegal
| because the law requires "free and informed consent".
| Refusing service without consent isn't a free choice to
| the user.
|
| Similar for Google that went the "you can disable cookies
| in your browser" way, I doubt that will survive a lawsuit
| in the coming years.
| [deleted]
| danpalmer wrote:
| I did have a similar example to this a year ago. We were
| partnering with an affiliate marketing agency, and they asked
| us to include their tracker on our website. When probed about
| how the tracker worked, they revealed that it worked by
| scraping everything that looked like an email address and
| sending it to their servers in order to attribute user signups,
| and they required it on every page.
|
| I said that was a gross violation of our users' privacy and
| that we would only implement our own significantly restricted
| server-side tracking that didn't reveal any user info. Their
| response implied they really weren't challenged on their
| practices often at all.
| dtech wrote:
| Was this in US or EU? I wouldn't be surprised if it is EU but
| theoretically this should be so GDPR non-compliant that
| Merkel personally throws you out.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| CCPA probably makes that illegal, which gives devs with a
| conscience a nice out: "that is wildly illegal if we do it
| to anyone in CA, we will have to develop it my way for them
| anyways, and it's cheaper to support only one system"
| danpalmer wrote:
| EU. Absolutely non-compliant and I don't think they could
| have cared less.
|
| We had to get special sign of from their senior leadership
| to implement the server-side tracking because it meant they
| could lose out on revenue if we didn't get it right.
|
| Ironically the server-side version bypassed
| adblockers/tracking protections (all we did was ping back
| after checkout with the total order value, no user data),
| so it was likely that they would make more revenue given
| than ~50% of users have some sort of blocking in their
| browsers.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| Thank you for having strong ethics. But, what a _bizarre_ dark
| pattern.
|
| How many users:
|
| 1. type out a complete email address
|
| 2. and then decide at the last moment to not hit "submit?"
|
| Who even does that? Like 0.00000001% of all users? I've been
| using the web since the mid 90s and I don't think I've _ever_
| done this. Ethics aside, it 's hard for me to believe that this
| dark pattern even yielded a useful return.
|
| To be perfectly clear, I'm not defending this dark pattern. It's
| bad. I'm just questioning its efficacy.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| parrellel wrote:
| Autocomplete would be my guess. Which makes it more obviously
| scummy.
| illnewsthat wrote:
| I've done this myself, and it's typically because I will want
| to go through the checkout process to see the total cost of
| something (including shipping which wasn't shared on the item
| page).
|
| I'll use auto fill to save time and quickly click through to
| the page that finally shows the full price, then I will back
| out.
|
| More recently, instead of auto fill I take extra time to type a
| fake email address just to prevent the "lost cart" marketing
| emails that were mentioned in the article.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| Me too, but the author describes something different.
|
| You say that you "click through to the page that finally
| shows the full price." So, you are explicitly submitting
| multiple times. There's a reasonable user explanation that
| your information would be received by the server.
|
| In the author's example, they're describing something more
| insidious -- saving the user's information before they submit
| the form, thereby subverting user expectation.
| beckingz wrote:
| If I haven't consented to receive your marketing emails or
| have not entered into a business arrangement by purchasing
| something, I do not expect to receive emails even if I
| expect that my information has been received by the server.
| jart wrote:
| Where is it written that it's a dark pattern to collect form
| information before the user presses submit? Maybe the company
| wants that information because sometimes the form breaks, or the
| user isn't able to figure it out, and they want to be able call
| that person on the phone or write them an email and be like, hey,
| can we help you fill out the form? That's perfectly reasonable in
| my opinion. But if the intent was to sell that email address to
| marketers who would put it on as many nonconsensual spam lists as
| possible, well, then that was going to happen regardless of
| whether or not the user pushed the button, because the whole
| website is a dark pattern which means leaving was the ethical
| thing to do, so let's not blame technology when the problem was
| people.
| surround wrote:
| The dark pattern is saving the email without informing the user
| or asking for permission to do so. Normally, permission is
| given when the user clicks "submit," but if you save the email
| _before_ they click submit, it 's a dark pattern.
| tenerifevisitor wrote:
| > They had no version control.
|
| I wouldn't have accepted the position in the first place.
|
| If I really would have needed the job, I would have left as soon
| as possible (6 months max).
|
| They did him a favor by letting him go.
| parsnips wrote:
| At Seamless circa 2010 we were asked to make the default sort
| order for restaurants appear by how close they were to the next
| tier of the contract. More orders = More Margin.
|
| The tech team at the time was entirely located in Utah at the
| time, and all of us were repulsed at the idea. We countered with
| suggestions for improvement and made it clear the project would
| not be worked on:
|
| - You can make a "promoted" restaurant section above the fold -
| The UX concerns since users expect some reasonable ordering. Like
| distance from location or alphabetical.
|
| We didn't get fired, and it was really scary. I appreciate
| standing up for ethics and principles. bravo.
| rsweeney21 wrote:
| Many years ago I added the feature to xbox.com to allow you to
| easily cancel your Xbox Live Gold subscription. We built a UX
| that was ideal for consumers - a couple of clicks, no "Here's
| what you'll be missing..." screens. It was awesome.
|
| Before this feature was released you had to call Xbox support to
| cancel.
|
| Once word spread that you could do it on the web, huge numbers of
| customers, that had been stuck paying for an Xbox Live Gold
| subscription they weren't using, began cancelling.
|
| So our PM got a call from a VP. We were instructed to remove it
| from the site immediately. We fantasized about telling the VP to
| stick it and quitting en masse, but we knew it wouldn't change
| anything. We'd just be replaced by someone that would.
|
| So we complied, but we all lost a little bit of our faith in Xbox
| that day.
| svnpenn wrote:
| > We'd just be replaced by someone that would.
|
| IE, you're part of the problem. You're just rationalizing to
| make yourself feel better.
| josefresco wrote:
| > So we complied, but we all lost a little bit of our faith in
| Xbox that day.
|
| You mean _shady subscription business models_ right? Because
| Microsoft is certainly not alone.
|
| Just the other day I had to CALL (as the only option) Network
| Solutions to cancel a security product.
| macd wrote:
| It's so short-sighted too.
|
| I signed up for America's Test Kitchen one time, because they
| had a nice program for learning the basics. Probably used it
| for a couple months, and then I was done with that content and
| wanted to cancel. Of course, even though you can sign up
| online, you have to cancel on the phone. On hold for 20-30
| minutes during work hours, then talk to the rep, then listen to
| their retention offer, then it's successfully cancelled.
|
| I actually loved the content, and would probably have
| resubscribed for a month here and there. (Cook's Illustrated is
| part of the same group and their content is also great.) But I
| will never do it again because of this experience.
|
| How many people decided to get the new Playstation next time
| because of a frustrating experience cancelling their xbox
| subscription? You won't see those numbers in a spreadsheet.
| erdo wrote:
| I once got a marketing email from British Airways with no
| "unsubscribe" link, I emailed back telling them to take me
| off their list as I never asked for marketing emails when I
| booked my ticket.
|
| The crazy thing is they replied, but refused to take me off
| the list unless I sent them an actual physical letter in the
| post. A few emails in they claimed it was due to a
| "technical" issue. That BS annoyed me so much, I am now into
| the 3rd decade of my own personal British Airways boycott
|
| Edit: I realise that's insane but it makes me giggle
| everytime I deliberately don't book BA, and I wonder to
| myself how much money I would be willing to loose by going
| for the next most expensive ticket, just to keep my boycott
| going
| dijit wrote:
| I engage in petty boycotts like this.
|
| Even if it's PEANUTS to them. I feel better, because at
| least _I'm_ not participating in perpetuating a shitty
| system.
|
| I feel especially good about it when those companies are
| ubiquitous and hard to avoid, because I feel rather
| righteous against an all encompassing behemoth that likely
| would have got my money otherwise.
| miles wrote:
| > The crazy thing is they replied, but refused to take me
| off the list unless I sent them an actual physical letter
| in the post. A few emails in they claimed it was due to a
| "technical" issue. That BS annoyed me so much, I am now
| into the 3rd decade of my own personal British Airways
| boycott
|
| I'm surprised BA even _had_ email in 1991 or earlier. Since
| britishairways.com doesn 't even make an appearance in the
| Wayback Machine until late 1998, perhaps we can forgive
| them their anachronistic practices of the day.
| boring_twenties wrote:
| > Of course, even though you can sign up online, you have to
| cancel on the phone. On hold for 20-30 minutes during work
| hours, then talk to the rep, then listen to their retention
| offer, then it's successfully cancelled.
|
| I haven't been in this situation, but I always imagined that
| there is a simple way out: send them a certified letter
| instructing them to cancel your subscription. If they
| continue charging after that, it's chargeback time.
|
| Any opinions on whether or not this would work?
| staticautomatic wrote:
| The answer would be in the user agreement. If it does not
| enumerate permissible ways of cancelling, then yes.
| Otherwise idk but probably not. Contract language which
| limits methods of cancelling is likely enforceable unless
| there's a statute prohibiting it.
| jmtulloss wrote:
| You can also just chargeback the charge on your credit
| card. You'll probably win if they make it hard to cancel
| and they'll get the message fast
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Chargebacks are inadvisable in case there is digital
| content associated with the account. In every terms of
| service I've ever read there is a clause saying the
| consumer cannot perform chargebacks. They're likely to nuke
| your account for "fraud" if the bank reverses the
| transaction, potentially causing thousands of dollars in
| losses.
| ticviking wrote:
| So DRM is once again shown to be evil.
|
| And digital "purchases" aren't really purchases.
| codewithcheese wrote:
| That has worked for me before. A company which explicitly
| said they do not process cancellations via support form or
| email. I sent an email saying I wish to cancel and I
| consider the email reasonable notification and I will
| chargeback any further charges. They cancelled the account.
| 8ytecoder wrote:
| Not just short-sighted, these sort of things is why I don't
| try anything that involves a subscription. That is also why I
| make them pay the Apple Tax and subscibe through Apple
| instead.
| lobocinza wrote:
| It is only true if you measure it. ;)
|
| Companies rely too much on analytics.
| handmodel wrote:
| While I suspect in most cases (at least for smaller brands)
| making it hard to cancel pays off I 100% agree there is a
| measurement problem.
|
| If you are optimizing for money made in the next month - or
| even next two years - then by definition making it hard to
| cancel will bring in more money. But it does hurt the brand
| long term (which is harder to measure)
| tshaddox wrote:
| What I fear is that hostile behavior like this is actually
| _not_ short-sighted. I suspect in many cases these companies
| are pretty savvy about how their business models work, and I
| suspect that they are correctly estimating that they will end
| up ahead both in the short term and the long term by making
| recurring payments easy to forget and difficult to cancel. I
| really don 't see this sort of customer ill will being that
| effective at scale. I will probably never pay America's Test
| Kitchen one penny after hearing your review, but my
| impression is that they still have an excellent reputation.
| And do you really have great alternatives? Does Playstation
| not use the exact sort of hostile patterns as Xbox?
| macd wrote:
| I'm also afraid of that, good point.
|
| I'm a fan of Serious Eats for cooking content. Again, ATK
| was great except for the subscription thing. Looking at
| their Support page, it looks like nothing has changed with
| their cancellation policy[1] (the fact that you can cancel
| your physical magazine subscription online, but not the
| website subscription is hilarious). I would LOVE to know if
| they have support for online cancellation for California
| customers, that they just disable for non-California
| customers. I've heard of companies doing things like that.
|
| Not sure if Playstation did the same, but Xbox doesn't make
| this difficult this anymore anyways. In fact, recently I
| started a Game Pass Xbox subscription on my xbox account
| and used it for a couple days. Then I realized I should do
| it on my main microsoft account instead (so I don't have
| multiple accounts anymore), so I cancelled. They gave me a
| full refund automatically without me needing to ask or do
| anything. So companies do change, although I imagine it's
| just easier to implement it this way anyways. Phone-based
| customer service is really expensive.
|
| [1] https://www.americastestkitchen.com/support#change-
| membershi...
| rdtwo wrote:
| I was actually going to buy a subscription but luckily I
| learned about that policy and never did.
|
| Now I use a privacy card for all subscriptions to avoid
| the hassle
| forbiddenvoid wrote:
| This is my perspective exactly. It's hard to be mad at
| someone for optimizing for their own desired outcome.
|
| I'm mad that it works.
| willcipriano wrote:
| I suspect it is shorted sighted in a sense, and not in
| another. The choice to prevent cancelation likely hurts the
| long term revenue of Microsoft and at the same time
| maximizes the short term revenue of that executive. He will
| be working somewhere else by the time that chicken comes
| home to roost, so it maximises his value long term.
| tshaddox wrote:
| What I'm saying is that it will potentially also help
| revenue in the long term, and that "customer ill will"
| won't actually spread and turn away customers at any
| noticeable scale.
| willcipriano wrote:
| My feeling is this sort of thing is a death from a
| thousand cuts situation. If it happens once or twice
| revenue wont be driven into the ground but if you keep it
| up eventually consumers will have had enough and start
| looking for alternatives.
| jdgoesmarching wrote:
| There's long vs short term, but I'd also add ease of
| calculating a decision's value. Ironically I think a lot
| of the business and tech world is hamstrung by "data-
| driven" decision making which assumes
|
| 1. You have all the necessary data and
|
| 2. You are interpreting it correctly and completely
|
| This is almost never true, so instead "data driven" is
| mostly "data covering-your-ass." Maybe the future will
| yield leaders more capable of wielding data less like a
| cudgel, but I'm not optimistic.
| musicale wrote:
| > It's so short-sighted too.
|
| > How many people decided to get the new Playstation next
| time because of a frustrating experience cancelling their
| xbox subscription
|
| If you make it hard to unsubscribe when people are short on
| time/money/interest, they will probably be less likely to
| resubscribe when they have the time/money/interest.
|
| Long-term customers on something like Xbox Live have a larger
| incentive to resubscribe to recover access to their game
| library.
|
| On the other hand, random web site X is probably just looking
| to churn through subscribers.
|
| It's something of a tragedy of the commons; the incredible
| difficulty of unsubscribing from (everything that's a monthly
| bill) makes people wary of subscribing to anything.
| marcinzm wrote:
| >It's so short-sighted too.
|
| No it's not. The VP is maximizing their bonus and career
| growth within the company. That is likely tied to relatively
| short term metrics and especially to not having drops in
| metrics.
| jbnorth wrote:
| Just to be clear, you confirmed that it was a short-sighted
| decision.
| marcinzm wrote:
| No, there is no negative long term consequence for the VP
| so it is likely the optimal decision from both a short
| and long term perspective.
| t0mas88 wrote:
| I know the majority opinion in the US is "less rules is
| good", but as a counter point: European consumer protection
| laws prohibit this, if you can sign up online it's mandatory
| to offer online cancellation without extra hurdles. Sometimes
| having some rules is a good thing...
| eindiran wrote:
| I want to hit that sweet spot where my bad behavior is
| unconstrained by the rules but everyone else's bad behavior
| is.
| 8ytecoder wrote:
| Europe also goes through the pain of developing rules and
| laws that are incredibly detailed and specific. US just
| doesn't have that culture. The law will be vague and it'll
| require at least a few lawsuits before it gets settled as
| to what they actually mean. This and the general misuse of
| lawsuits (I mean "Do not iron while wearing the shirt")
| here is why people are against laws.
| erdo wrote:
| That's interesting if true, because my gym in France
| (Neoness) just made me turn up in person to cancel my
| rolling monthly subscription, despite the fact that I
| signed up on line. (Obviously I will never, ever be giving
| them my money again regardless)
| gumoro wrote:
| Do you have a reference for that? Struggling to find one,
| and very interested.
| avitous wrote:
| This is one reason I won't purchase a subscription any longer
| unless they accept Paypal, which makes it ridiculously easy
| to terminate recurring payments to them (easier than calling
| my credit card company to dispute a charge). Having such a
| kill switch was how I was able to cancel my NYTimes
| subscription (another org notorious for making it impossible
| to cancel) without going through the same kind of hassle of
| dealing with a sales rep trying to keep my account.
| zipiridu wrote:
| I have a similar story for internet. I tried to cancel my
| Xfinity (Comcast) internet service through the online chat.
| After being transferred several times, the person said they
| will do it but then disconnected right after they said that.
| I had to restart the process and in the end they told me I
| had to call. So I called and finally was able to cancel after
| they wasted hours of my time.
|
| I will never use Xfinity/Comcast again in my life if I have a
| choice and will try to make sure everyone knows how shitty
| they are. Unfortunately they have monopolies in many areas
| and can be as shitty as they want, but if you have a choice I
| recommend never using them.
|
| I can't believe that in 2021 these tactics are still legal.
| It's also stupidly shortsighted because in the long term I'm
| pretty sure they lose money by making everyone hate them. If
| it was easy to cancel, I would happily sign up again in the
| future without giving it much thought and would think
| positively of the company.
|
| Edit: I also want to add that I was paying extra to not have
| a contract so I could easily cancel.
| Farfromthehood wrote:
| I've heard the Comcast "retention agents" have a quota or
| retentions vs cancellations they must maintain, hence ask
| the disconnected cancellation calls.
|
| For a time, I resorted to having an attorney cancel my
| Comcast service to ensure it actually happened.
|
| But once, months after the attorney forwarded my Comcast
| cancellation confirmation, I received a notice from a
| collections agency for the exact Comcast account I had
| cancelled. The attorney took care of that too.
|
| My new (and best) method for dealing with Comcast is to use
| a fake name and social. I've been using the cats' names for
| the past few years, and it works great!
|
| I recently wanted to quit Comcast service at one of my
| properties, so I went online to chat. No agents available,
| so I just removed my credit card from the account and
| stopped paying. They'll figure it out eventually. And good
| luck of they're going to try to collect from Westley the
| Cat. He's unemployed.
| DaveExeter wrote:
| >use a fake name and social
|
| They let you use a fake social security #?
| walrus01 wrote:
| If you want it done quickly tell them you're going to
| prison.
| only_as_i_fall wrote:
| The best way to do this in my experience is to tell them
| you're moving in with a partner who is already subscribed.
| Works equally well whether true or not.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| My foolproof flowchart:
|
| "Why are you cancelling?"
|
| "I'm moving overseas."
|
| "Where to?"
|
| "I'd prefer not to say."
| shard wrote:
| When I canceled my Comcast internet service, I got much
| less resistance from them, but this was in the days where
| they still had physical offices that you can go to. I took
| my modem and dropped it off, telling them to cancel my
| subscription. When they tried to give me the retention
| speech, I told them I had already switched providers. End
| of conversation.
| hangonhn wrote:
| Someone should make a website that rates services by ease of
| unsubscribing and include a link to the unsubscribe link if one
| exists.
|
| A few publications that I enjoy is on my "Never subscribe" list
| because of the difficulty of unsubscribing. On the other hand,
| unsubscribing from HBO Max (at least via Apple TV) was so easy
| that I don't hesitate to unsubscribe and resubscribe and have
| done so a couple of times.
| IngvarLynn wrote:
| >we knew it wouldn't change anything. We'd just be replaced by
| someone that would.
|
| Ye goode olde self-fulfilling prophecy.
| newsclues wrote:
| If I need a job, if the money is right my ethics are
| negotiable.
|
| This is the norm.
| fridif wrote:
| I think history has proven that there will always be someone
| willing to do what hundreds of millions of people wont
| [deleted]
| dwaltrip wrote:
| Certain bad things that people used to do don't happen
| anymore. This must mean that, in general, actions really do
| matter -- even if it is very hard to know ahead of time
| which ones will have a significant impact.
| suzzer99 wrote:
| There needs to be a law that any subscription that can be
| signed up for online should be cancelable online. I'm not in
| favor of just implementing new laws willy nilly. But it's clear
| that companies are never going to do this on their own.
| universa1 wrote:
| I think Germany recently voted for this as well, so we will
| have this soonish :-) so if you can sign up online, there
| needs to be a similar way for cancelling.
| halfdan wrote:
| This has been law since October 2016 in Germany. See SS 309
| Nr. 13 des BGB
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| We should be able to just tell the credit card company to
| cancel recurring payments. They'll try to charge the card and
| get denied.
| rdtwo wrote:
| Capital one privacy cards are amazing for that. They paid
| me 250 to open one 2% cash back and unlimited privacy cards
| JTbane wrote:
| As far as I know, you're still on the hook for contractual
| payments, like most gym memberships and cell plans.
| tshaddox wrote:
| Of course you would be, just like if you maxed out your
| credit card or closed your credit card account. This
| doesn't pose a new or unique problem.
| btilly wrote:
| You can.
| mandelbrotwurst wrote:
| I requested that from one card provider and they told me
| that they couldn't and I'd have to get a new card number
| to stop the charges.
|
| When you say "you can", are you just saying "you can
| ask", or that you've had success doing this?
|
| If the latter, mind sharing which card provider that was
| with?
| JeremyMorgan wrote:
| This is how all of my cards are. Can't cancel recurring
| payments unless it's fraud. They must issue a new card.
|
| If there's hope for beating this dark pattern, it lies
| with banks/CC companies
| IntrepidWorm wrote:
| > You can.
|
| My understanding is that this will be reflected in credit
| reporting as delinquency- seems like a lose-lose in that
| sense. Can someone who has done this weigh in?
| HDMI_Cable wrote:
| I think California has something like that.
| ryanmcbride wrote:
| We do indeed! Doesn't stop many people from making it a
| pain in the ass but stops some.
| rsweeney21 wrote:
| So the rest of the story is that Ohio was the first state to
| pass a law requiring users be able to cancel subscriptions
| on-line. So we had to add it back in, but only for users in
| Ohio and it was burried on the site and had like 7 pages of
| "account saving" stuff.
|
| Eventually most states passed similar laws and so we opened
| it up to all US accounts. I'm not sure what the experience is
| like today.
| t0mas88 wrote:
| Europe has that law. Not all countries have fully implemented
| it yet but there is a deadline for all to have it.
| neolog wrote:
| California has that law
| bilbo0s wrote:
| Which is great for California, but what about everyone
| else?
|
| I think that was the point of the comment.
| ucm_edge wrote:
| Often times if you change your address to be a CA
| address, websites will suddenly reveal an online cancel
| option. I swapped my parents' NYT account to be my CA
| address and suddenly "click here to cancel" was displayed
| on the website.
|
| While I agree it should be a default setting, it's a
| useful little trick.
| dasil003 wrote:
| Just be careful if the CA Franchise Tax Board ever gets
| wind of it, they'll come after you for 10% income tax for
| the rest of your life.
| [deleted]
| yumraj wrote:
| > Which is great for California, but what about everyone
| else?
|
| Vote in the next election for people/party that are more
| consumer friendly than industry friendly.
|
| For all its flaws, CA had some of the most consumer and
| employee friendly (such as no non compete) laws.
| tkojames wrote:
| I feel the lack of non compete is one of the main reasons
| tech took off in CA. That and the weather. For as much as
| people say starting a business in CA is hard, and it can
| be. For tech it is so easy I can just quit my job and
| start my company.
| tlogan wrote:
| > but what about everyone else?
|
| Vote.
| tshaddox wrote:
| But in California companies can (apparently) still require
| you to chat with a real person online and thus still need
| to do everything synchronously, wait in a queue, and argue
| with them for several minutes before they will cancel the
| subscription.
|
| Personally I think that any time you grant permission to
| anyone to bill you automatically on a recurring basis, you
| need to be able to revoke that permission. This ought to be
| a fundamental mechanism of personal banking that you ought
| to be able to manage on your bank account online. It's
| astonishing to me that your bank can't even tell you all
| the ongoing recurring payments that are permitted on your
| account (or if they do, it's an ad hoc implementation that
| tries to detect recurring payment amounts, vendor names,
| etc.)
| Clubber wrote:
| I was once a subscriber to the NYT, and will never be again
| because of this. I wonder if they are actually making money
| with this tactic or losing.
| smithza wrote:
| They are the most subscribed to print/digital media source
| in the United States. Their market share is considerable
| and they have the reputation to bring in new subs. They
| offer college students free/heavily-reduced subs to 'get em
| in', etc. This tactic sucks for the consumer who wants out,
| but the frustration keeps them from picking up the phone
| and committing to cancelling because 'hey, its only x
| dollars/month'
| o8r3oFTZPE wrote:
| Thank you for sharing this Microsoft story. One way to
| interpret it is that the only people who would hire you and
| your colleagues and compensate you the most were [insert
| unpleasant description]. I say that sincerely as someone who
| many years ago worked in the software industry then left to
| work in other industries. I was not a developer but was someone
| who worked with management on a daily basis. I saw a marked
| difference in character between people working in management in
| the software industry versus the others. It is worth
| considering why you could not all quit en masse. Who else would
| hire you? What would they pay you? To be fair, as far as "dark
| patterns" go, specifically, making cancelling subscriptions
| difficult, I think that existed long before software companies.
| However, it is food for thought to consider what kind of
| industry is employing and compensating you the most for your
| "work", and what other industries are not. None of this implies
| any "blame" targeted at anyone, it just highlights what
| _monetary_ value society places on programming and the cast of
| characters who set that value. I worked alongside programmers
| in other industries besides software and we never asked them to
| anything unethical. Some of them arguably could have tried to
| work at Microsoft. They had freedom of choice.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| This really has nothing to do with software as a product
| sector. XBox subscriptions aren't even subscriptions to
| software, right? It's subscriptions to game content, which is
| no different from subscribing to any other form of media.
|
| The one I'm still hooked on, that this reminds me I've now
| given something like $3,000 dollars to over 3 years because
| I've been too lazy to make a phone call and wait on hold, is
| the YMCA.
|
| Even religious nonprofits are engaging in dark patterns.
| viro wrote:
| dark patterns that require you to call the company should be
| illegal... like criminally illegal. Edit: how is this a
| controversial take
| amelius wrote:
| Why not fix it for everyone with an IP address that's not in
| your boss's area?
| cvak wrote:
| You think the boss even knew how to use that feature, or hell
| even had an Xbox? He just saw excel sheet with cancellation
| numbers, and asked someone what is happening.
| AlexCoventry wrote:
| Because subscriptions would keep dropping, the reasons would
| be investigated, and there's a high risk that the people
| responsible for the fraud would do time?
| amelius wrote:
| Jail time for refusing to implement a dark pattern?
| AlexCoventry wrote:
| No, for defrauding your employer. Having your heart in
| the right place is not a reliable legal defense.
| [deleted]
| ping_pong wrote:
| Over a decade ago, I worked at well-known web site in one of
| the smaller properties. The site looked like it was from the
| mid-90s. A year-long effort was made to upgrade the site to
| something more modern, and it was beautiful.
|
| It went live, and almost immediately the number of ad clicks
| dropped significantly. It turned out that the older site was so
| hard to use that customers would inadvertently click on ads,
| bringing up the revenue. The new site was so much easier to use
| that customers clicked on less ads.
|
| The changes were almost immediately rolled back.
|
| I think eventually the new site was put back in, but only after
| they ensured that ad clicks wouldn't go down precipitiously,
| but I had after by then.
| musicale wrote:
| > Once word spread that you could do it on the web, huge
| numbers of customers, that had been stuck paying for an Xbox
| Live Gold subscription they weren't using, began cancelling.
|
| Unfortunately that's the allure of dark and customer-hostile
| patterns - they extract a lot of money from people, at least in
| the short term.
|
| If you're Microsoft/Xbox, though, you might want to think a bit
| about long term.
| api wrote:
| Anything that makes me call to cancel never ever gets my
| business again.
| viro wrote:
| If you can sign up without a call you should be able to
| cancel without a call. Its the #1 reason Im pro-apple
| enforcing its IAP stuff.
| morelisp wrote:
| > We'd just be replaced by someone that would.
|
| Unionize.
| bsd44 wrote:
| "We fantasized about telling the VP to stick it and quitting en
| masse, but we knew it wouldn't change anything. We'd just be
| replaced by someone that would."
|
| That's a very bad argument. If you guide yourself by that logic
| then you can't really blame anyone for doing anything, because
| everything is justified.
| strogonoff wrote:
| Related PSA: many customer support chat integrations on websites
| today give the rep a real-time view of all input changes _before_
| you actually send anything.
|
| Think twice before pasting unknown clipboard contents, typing
| while angry, etc. Best, explicitly copy your finalized reply from
| another app and paste it into the chat.
|
| (I confirmed that first hand when a support person replied to
| specifics of my message while I was editing the phrasing.)
| hiidrew wrote:
| Can confirm that Salesforce integrated chats do this
| AlexCoventry wrote:
| I wonder whether enterprise slack does.
| andi999 wrote:
| But what is the point. Why do you want to know e. g. if the
| customer is so angry that they want to haunt you in your dreams
| like Freddy Krueger.
| icefo wrote:
| Something similar applies when you're on the phone. When you're
| on hold, the agent can hear everything you say most of the time
| vosper wrote:
| > Related PSA: many customer support chat integrations on
| websites today give the rep a real-time view of all input
| changes before you actually send anything.
|
| Related Related PSA: Tools like Logrocket record full-fidelity
| videos of your entire session on a website. They're great for
| debugging. It also means you should assume that every website
| you use has a video of everything you did that people can scrub
| and search through (it's more than a video actually, it's
| capturing and re-rendering the DOM, network traffic etc... like
| I said, amazing for debugging)
| [deleted]
| bengale wrote:
| https://www.rrweb.io/ Is a cool open source alternative. We
| use it with sentry to see what causes our exceptions.
|
| Also with a lot of these tools you can configure them to
| redact user input so you don't capture too much.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| How do I block this?
| kaszanka wrote:
| Something like ||*.logrocket.network^
| ||*.logrocket.io^ ||*.lr-ingest.io^
| ||*.logicanalytics.io^
|
| in uBlock/ABP filtering rules would be a good start. Not
| sure what logicanalytics is exactly, but it's used on
| logrocket's main page. Using NoScript like the other
| commenter said is safer though (this won't catch on-
| premises deployments of logrocket and it will stop blocking
| it when they change the domain).
| gorhill wrote:
| Best to remove `*.`, otherwise your filters will match
| only subdomains of those domains -- unless that is really
| what you want to accomplish.
| jspash wrote:
| You'll want to add hotjar.com to that list. They do the
| same thing.
| JoshuaDavid wrote:
| Block javascript using something like NoScript (which will
| still let you allow javascript on specific sites you
| explicitly approve, but will block JS from running by
| default).
| shadowoflight wrote:
| I know this is probably just a me problem, but man, that makes
| me feel kinda bad for all the times I've angrily typed out an
| insult-laden chat message into customer support chats for
| cathartic reasons before deleting it and sending something
| nicer.
|
| Not entirely bad, because recording what I type without my
| hitting send is shady asf on the company's part, but it makes
| me feel bad for the human on the other end of the chat.
|
| Anyways, thanks for sharing, I'll have to keep this in mind in
| the future and maybe do less angry-typing-and-then-backspacing.
| shpx wrote:
| This is how chat apps _should_ work or have the option of
| working. Why make you look at an animated "..." until I'm
| satisfied with my message when you could be watching me write
| it instead? It's closer to how conversation works and we have
| the bandwidth and the latency.
|
| It's immoral because you're lying by hiding that this is
| happening and not making it go both ways, so why not show users
| and just make it part of the UI?
| formerly_proven wrote:
| You're reading other peoples unfinished thoughts before
| they've said them?!
| imalerba wrote:
| Wouldn't that be closer to a real spoken conversation?
|
| As long as you're told what the behaviour is, I don't see a
| problem. I think for short lived chats such as those
| support chats it would speed up things.
| josephg wrote:
| Yeah. The problem here is that they do it without letting
| you know.
| zajio1am wrote:
| Agreed. I like the behavior of traditional unix talk, which
| worked like that.
| progval wrote:
| Google Wave did this (and with nest threads)! I never tried
| it for serious conversations, but it was quite fun to write
| at the same time as 1-3 other people and see them amend their
| messages in real time.
| suzzer99 wrote:
| We had a sales guy pitch exactly this when I worked at a big
| media corp. The big boss on the marketing side just happened to
| be in the room at the time, and told everyone that no one was
| ever to work with this company. I was impressed.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| That's extremely obnoxious. I wonder if I can make uBlock
| Origin block this.
| maxwelljoslyn wrote:
| I really dislike this because it violates the user's assumption
| that the action they are in control of, "send message,"
| represents a hard barrier between committing and not committing
| to their wording.
|
| Unsavory.
| bcx wrote:
| Keep posting about this stuff. I can tell you this is a feature
| our customers often ask for, but we (https://Olark.com) refuse
| to implement, we do lose business over this.
|
| I'd like to believe the karma for not letting any of our
| customers be creepy (and/or violate their customers' privacy),
| pays for the lost business many times over.
| contravariant wrote:
| You guys really ought to advertise those kinds of things
| more. The only reason you're losing business over it is that
| your customer's customers aren't aware.
|
| The least you could do is post a blog post about the dark
| patterns you refuse to unleash on your customer's customers
| and why.
| SheinhardtWigCo wrote:
| Seconded, I'd like to read a blog post about that.
| taude wrote:
| There's companies out there who's marketing automation
| platforms do this by default when you use their embedded
| widgets.....
| tlogan wrote:
| Sadly this is standard for certain set of services and websites.
|
| I think some of these widgets similar to intercom do this.
|
| In short, I assume that the sales team is just following industry
| practices for that vertical / type of the sites. If not, then it
| is your job to explain the best practices for your industry
| (i.e., how these kinda of things will generate a lot of spam,
| will make potential customers weary the service, etc.).
| Tenoke wrote:
| The impressive thing here isn't that some random company is doing
| it but how many don't recognize it is a dark pattern even when
| told it is one on _HN_.
| raxxorrax wrote:
| Some larger companies have trained psychologists to nudge
| people to rationalize their deeds.
|
| You aren't just working for an ad company. You are working for
| the benefit of manind. You bring joy to everyone and restore
| justice in this world... with ads.
| belval wrote:
| It's THE thing that I don't like about modern corporate
| culture, most of us (like +95%) aren't building a new
| tomorrow or addressing rising inequalities. We build stuff to
| make money. That's it. That's the goal. It makes me angry
| when you have internal corporate propaganda trying to spin
| this as a greater mission.
|
| Then you have the coworkers that drink the koolaid and talk
| as if you were in a cult.
| sdoering wrote:
| Thanks. Exactly that. I once was lucky (OK expected to
| attend the all hands) listening to the world lead of our
| business unit talking about how we would make the world a
| better place by making hospital emergency rooms more
| efficient by applying a Uber model to it. How Uber was the
| epitome of making a bad experience better for the end user
| and how this company's mindset should be applied to the
| world. The ER experience was just an example that would be
| ripe for disruption in his view as it had not changed in
| the last few decades from a "user perspective".
|
| I filed his talk under "corporate bs for 500" but sadly our
| local leadership drank the cool aid.
|
| I do not have a problem with making money. Or helping
| companies do so. I know that this is the center piece of
| capitalism. Great if you provide added value with your
| offering but making money is paying our mortgage in the
| end.
|
| But for the sake of it. Don't try to brainwash me into
| believing that what I do makes the world a better place in
| any significant way.
| JasonFruit wrote:
| > I do not have a problem with making money. Or helping
| companies do so. I know that this is the center piece of
| capitalism. Great if you provide added value with your
| offering but making money is paying our mortgage in the
| end.
|
| Exactly! Why do we have to pretend we have a goal other
| than making money without compromising our principles?
| The best way to make money and keep on doing so is to
| give people something that is worth spending their money
| on. A good product at a fair price isn't healing the
| world, but it's not breaking anyone's leg either.
|
| I wonder if a lot of this goes back to early 20th-century
| businessmen who tried to apply Transcendentalist thought
| to business, promoting unity and loyalty by creating a
| feeling of a noble cause in their employees (Charles
| Ives, an insurance executive and composer, is the example
| I'm most familiar with).
| erikerikson wrote:
| The restorative power of meeting people's needs can be
| underestimated.
| erikerikson wrote:
| The centerpiece (or perhaps incentive) of capitalism is
| the _cooperation_ between people that money facilitates
| more efficiently. Not to ignore the challenges of
| liberalized economies or the way this can be twisted...
|
| Not sure about your scenario but writing code does at
| least sometimes improve the world. I helped create a
| product that was later used to restore the rule of law in
| a country trying to recover from genocide. The homicide
| and assault rates for the entire country dropped by
| double digits following use. That seemed significant.
|
| While most of my efforts since have had far less dramatic
| outcomes but the general circumstance is that even
| mundane things like keeping the lights on are
| instrumental for peace in our societies. Such things are
| far from the dark patterns side of the industry but
| there's something about babies and bathwater. We can
| contribute to supporting the more constructive and
| healthy efforts.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| And if you call them out on this obvious bullshit you get
| fired for creating a hostile work environment or some equally
| bullshit reason.
| ryantgtg wrote:
| I'm seeing a lot of people who didn't understand what is being
| described. I'm a front-end dev (kind of) and didn't understand
| the description in the blog post. Once it's been explained on
| HN, most people here seem to agree.
| JohnDeHope wrote:
| "even when told it is one on HN" I think this is an appeal to
| authority, a logical fallacy.
| https://www.thoughtco.com/logical-fallacies-appeal-to-author...
|
| Is there a reasonable list of "dark patterns" that this tactic
| in the OP falls into? I don't doubt it is a dark pattern. I'd
| just like to know which one it is, and have it explained to me
| in a little bit more detail. Thanks!
| JasonFruit wrote:
| I think the point of that part was, "Even the dark-pattern-
| addicted HN crowd recognizes that this is a dark pattern, so
| why doesn't everyone?"
| titzer wrote:
| Reading the comments here, I am surprised how many people are
| outraged over the collection of an email address.
|
| You're going to _flip_ when you find out what they know about
| your location from your mobile phone.
| [deleted]
| k2enemy wrote:
| Good on you for standing up to what you saw as a violation of
| trust and ethics! You're light on the details of the departure
| though. Were they explicit that the relationship "fizzled"
| because of your refusal to deploy the code?
|
| At a meta level, this post seems a little strange to me. Is the
| linked site your blog? Or a discussion forum you're trying to
| bootstrap and drive traffic to? If telling the story of this
| ethical dilemma and the consequences were the driving motivation
| for this submission, it seems a little low effort and light on
| details of the consequences. But if it was to drive traffic to
| your forum, then I guess it did a good job.
| kube-system wrote:
| This is why laws that regulate data collection are so necessary.
| The ethical considerations that apply to software are so nuanced
| that they are very easy to get lost or ignored in a typical SDLC.
|
| It will be much easier for a developer (or an outsider) to throw
| up a red flag that is taken seriously if it's a legal concern.
| dhimes wrote:
| Totally agree. I think a lot of the "evil" that happens in
| business is done by well-intended people who make incremental
| decisions while trying to compete. Some of them probably make
| decisions they don't like, but because if they don't their
| competitors will eat their lunch, they have to.
|
| In my experience, honest business folks don't mind honest
| regulations. It keeps the playing field level.
| Cipater wrote:
| *well-intended people who make incremental decisions while
| trying to compete
|
| May I take issue with this statement?
|
| Why do you say they are well-intended when you subsequently
| say that the intention is to make money? (compete to make
| money)
| kube-system wrote:
| Because those concepts are not antithetical? We all feed
| our families somehow.
| dhimes wrote:
| I think you can view money not as the end goal, but as the
| means to accomplish your goal. If I have a goal to help
| people become educated, I use business as a way to organize
| resources (including people) to accomplish the goal. Money
| is necessary to make that happen. Even for open-source
| projects, money is necessary.
|
| I respectfully disagree with Milton Friedman's oft-quoted
| line, that the purpose of a business is to maximize value
| for its shareholders, at least if we set value = money.
| karaterobot wrote:
| There are laws that regulate data collection, it's just that
| companies who break them have every expectation that they'll
| never get caught at it.
|
| For example, here's an HHS page that exists to brag about the
| effectiveness of HIPAA enforcement[1], and even by their
| statistics, about 0.3% of complaints result in reviews. Now
| imagine what percentage of violations never result in
| complaints.
|
| GDPR is arguably more successful, insofar as they levied around
| $150M in fines last year, but most of that was from a couple
| big cases (Google chief among them) involving companies who are
| so big that even getting a $50M fine isn't going to change
| their underlying practices. It's the cost of doing business if
| hoarding private data is your business model.
|
| Pretty much every website I've ever looked at that had a GDPR
| compliance notice was implementing it in violation of the
| actual regulation: they set cookies first and then notify you
| about them. That's not how it works, dude. If you consider that
| GDPR applies to any business that transacts with EU citizens,
| the number of non-compliant websites is so huge that $150M is
| _nothing_. The only effect of GDPR in practice has been to fill
| the world with meaningless banners, not to protect anybody 's
| data.
|
| And in a nutshell, that's how data collection and privacy
| regulation has worked out in the real world: a lot of
| meaningless compliance theater, while business goes on as
| usual.
|
| [1]https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/compliance-
| enfor...
| kube-system wrote:
| GDPR is successful because they hand out fines but every
| website is in violation of it? I would think that a
| successful law results in compliance.
|
| As someone who has worked with HIPAA data, I have personally
| seen the data treated with a great deal of thought around
| compliance. I think the numbers you cite are a _result_ of
| that, not in spite of it. As your source points out, many of
| those complaints aren 't eligible for enforcement. This isn't
| because HIPAA isn't enforced, it's because many of the people
| who are complaining don't know what HIPAA does.
|
| But the US needs their own general privacy law too, GDPR is
| not enough, as it isn't applicable to a lot of software built
| in the US.
| philote wrote:
| I used to work for a company that did this, but it was supposedly
| covered by their client sites' TOS. The client site would install
| our tag, and our JS code would listen for emails to be entered,
| and would send them to our backend to collect and cross-reference
| with visitor on our other clients' sites. This allowed us to send
| emails to visitors who left sites with buying anything, even if
| they never entered their email on that site.
| dm319 wrote:
| I'm heartened to come here and see people refusing to do things
| for ethical reasons. You need better protections in your work
| though. I work in the medical field, and refusing to do something
| is a common occurrence and certainly not a sackable offence - but
| I guess the impact of what we do is immediately visible on
| someone present. A lot of decisions people make in other lines of
| work will impact a nameless person somewhere out of sight, so I
| guess it's easier to be unethical.
| freedomben wrote:
| I have been waiting for doctors and other medical staff,
| especially in ERs, to stand up about the insane over-charging
| that takes place. Everyone seems to have a story, but in mine
| before I agreed to anything I asked how much it would be. I was
| given an estimate of around $1,200 for a scan, decided to
| proceed because I knew I had $1,800 in my HSA. Turned out they
| charged me almost $4,000 and I ended up in collections. I would
| have _never, ever_ agreed to the scan if they had been honest.
| ticviking wrote:
| Get them to put it in writing.
|
| Also you can usually mail a check with a short letter
| explaining you are paying the estimated cost and caching the
| check is the same as honoring that estimate.
| stevebmark wrote:
| Many forms autosave, I don't see this as a clear example of a
| dark pattern.
| Abimelex wrote:
| If the regarding company is EU based or offering their services
| also in EU you are obliged to report them to data protection
| authorities.
| notanormalnerd wrote:
| I don't know why this hasn't come up in any of the threads.
| With the GDPR this is illegal. Your data officer would be
| furious and your VP probably out of a job for getting a
| 100.000EUR fine. There is no reason you need that when the user
| did not submit it, so you have no explicit consent. As a
| developer in Europe I live the GDPR. I love my privacy and the
| privacy of the users. All the marketing and sales stuff has
| been proofen to not work very well, so what the heck?
| klyrs wrote:
| Years ago, I had a boss who really wanted me to do popup ads and
| spam. I was the only programmer, so the buck stopped with me.
| Every time, I told him to shove it.
|
| Eventually, he threatened to hire outside developers to do the
| work. Previous to my employment, he'd used foreign contractors
| who were quick to cash checks and slow to do the work, and rarely
| satisfied the order. I called him on it. "Go ahead, go back to
| your past contractors... but by the way, wasn't your
| dissatisfaction with them the whole reason you hired me?"
|
| I think he managed to find an external marketing company to spam
| for him, but he never got popup ads under my watch. The funniest
| was the time he discovered popunder ads -- he thought I'd be cool
| with those, for some reason. Sorry, guy.
| [deleted]
| akagusu wrote:
| There is no ethics in business anymore, in Tech industry and any
| other industry.
|
| The right to buy food and pay your bills is what you get from
| your payment if, and only if, you are willing to compromise your
| own ethics.
|
| If you start to make your work decisions based on ethics it will
| be really hard for you to stay at your current job or get a new
| one.
|
| Unfortunately, this is the world we live now.
| bittercynic wrote:
| Do you think there are some exceptions to this rule?
|
| I have the impression that grocery retailer Costco is
| relatively good in terms of respecting their workers and
| customers, and I think that is one factor in their success. I'd
| be interested in learning about other companies that have
| priorities beyond maximizing this quarter's numbers, or
| learning why my impression of Costco is wrong.
| akagusu wrote:
| I think some exceptions are small/medium businesses,
| specially small businesses. If you look at the majority of
| small businesses not only in America but all over the world,
| they don't even make profit, they just pay the bills, they
| don't have the mindset of grow at all cost.
|
| About Costco, I really don't know, but I know some big
| companies can have ethics because I've worked for one. It was
| the best place I ever worked.
|
| Unfortunately, it is rare these days.
| bserge wrote:
| Anymore? It used to be worse.
| akagusu wrote:
| Do you think it was worse? Why?
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| What sort of ethics do you have that need to be comprised to
| work in tech?
| akagusu wrote:
| Tell me one tech company that does not use dark patterns? And
| I think the problem is not only tech, it's everywhere. People
| turned on the "money at all cost" mindset. They know their
| actions will do harm to someone but they simply don't care.
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| All depends if you mean actual dark patterns or something
| you find distasteful. Either way my current company
| doesn't, we work in the electric Vergil's industry. Not a
| single distasteful thing expect some of the meetings with
| clients and management plans. But tech wise, none that I
| know of.
| ChicagoDave wrote:
| A reminder that WE are the product. Our emails, our phone
| numbers, what we're shopping for, what we drive, where we live,
| who we voted for....all of this is in a ginormous Oracle
| marketing database that they rent to other companies. Google,
| Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon...they all do the same thing. They
| track us and every digital footprint we make.
| phatbyte wrote:
| > They had no version control.
|
| Had to read this two times and check the year of the article to
| make sure this wasn't from 2001
| cactus2093 wrote:
| Also the use of "remote" to mean contractor legitimately
| confused me for a second, as if it never crossed the author's
| mind that a full-time employee could be remote.
| a2tech wrote:
| _Hacker News ghost story_
|
| I work with clients every day that don't have version control.
| Some of them are even using PHP!
| elwell wrote:
| Do they at least work on files locally? Or do they ssh in to
| modify the PHP file?
| Quarrelsome wrote:
| i mean, even without the dark patterns that's enough to justify
| quitting.
| yumraj wrote:
| > apologies, but I don't want to work on this task because it's a
| dark pattern.
|
| While I understand the intent, words matter. If those were the
| real words that were used, yes it will lead to souring of
| relationship. Unless we notice a systemic pattern, accusations
| should wait and that sounds like an accusation.
|
| Perhaps the client was indeed trying to do something customer
| friendly and they did not know better. It would have been better
| if the OP had offered a solution rather than excuse of them
| engaging in dark patterns and refusing to work on it.
|
| And, if the client had not taken that solution, yes, I will agree
| there is something nefarious. But till then, I wouldn't have
| jumped to that conclusion so quickly.
| mbostleman wrote:
| What would be the problem with naming the company here if
| everything said is the truth and there is no IP being disclosed
| or other issues like that?
|
| This is similar to when I see people posting in local contexts
| (like on FB groups) that so and so local company provided
| terrible service but the poster doesn't want to name names.
|
| What good is done if names aren't named? If we have a name, then
| things get fixed. Otherwise there is no feedback loop so there's
| really no point.
| brodock wrote:
| People don't want to risk get sued for nothing
| croes wrote:
| Is it really a dark pattern to secretly store the email address?
| Aren't dark patterns about tricking the user to something he
| doesn't want to do?
|
| This is just illegal data storage.
| t0mbstone wrote:
| I mean, technically, you could put something in the web site
| terms and conditions to the effect of, "all user input is
| recorded for quality assurance purposes", and then it wouldn't
| be illegal anymore.
|
| How is this any different than when telephone conversations are
| recorded on phone support lines, or when a video game records
| all user input and streams it to the remote server?
|
| It's all about disclosure up front. As long as the web site has
| done that properly, it's legal, right?
| sli wrote:
| > It's hard for people to understand or care about ethics in
| programming. One possible reason for this is that the issues are
| too nuanced.
|
| In my experience it's because the marketing team has already sold
| the dark patterns.
| dt3ft wrote:
| Respect.
| codingclaws wrote:
| thanks
| fc373745 wrote:
| to be honest, that's pretty tame as far as dark patterns go.
|
| If a user had already typed their email onto the field, then the
| user had at least some intent to sign up whatever the user wanted
| to sign up for.
|
| This makes what ad trackers and ISPs do with how we browse seem
| like war crimes if you were to call this a 'dark pattern'
| surround wrote:
| A dark pattern is tricking the user into doing something they
| didn't mean to do. I don't expect or intend my email address to
| be uploaded _before_ I click submit. I expect it to happen
| _after_.
| theshadowknows wrote:
| Purchasing member data from data brokers. I can't stand it.
| There's almost never a legitimate business reason to do it. It's
| invasive, aggressive, useless, expensive...anyway I make new
| enemies every week when I push back (less and less respectfully
| every time.) but it's something that I feel strongly about, and
| if my bosses want blind loyalty they can fire me and get a dog
| ev0lv wrote:
| But what about making it easier to auto-fill member's
| information into a contract? (sarcasm)
| belval wrote:
| So isn't this illegal? In the same way that a website can't send
| you their newsletter if you don't check the box at the bottom of
| the form when you register for something? Is that just a Canadian
| thing?
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| Well, who says they're going to send you a newsletter? It could
| be used by sales to contact you directly to ask why you didn't
| proceed. Instantly, that is what I assumed the email was for.
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| I was doing my taxes on taxact a year or two ago, when I noticed
| a small lag every time I switched fields. Every time I went to
| the next field, a network request was being made to some third
| party analytics thing with the data I entered.
|
| Somewhere, in the back of my mind I know that all data I enter
| online is inevitably being hovered up and used for god knows
| what, but when you're suddenly made aware of it, it's really
| unnerving.
|
| Something about this makes me want to have a 'falling down'
| moment. Let me get this straight, not only is our tax system so
| complex and error prone i have to pay money to a third party to
| figure out how much I should be paying to our government, but the
| software company I pay then turns around and sells my data? The
| government does nothing to remedy this? It really goes to show
| who our government serves, and it sure as hell isn't 'the
| people'.
| handrous wrote:
| Letting JavaScript initiate requests or mutate data associated
| with forms was a huge mistake.
| jareklupinski wrote:
| I mean... in a way... it is "serving its people"...
|
| in a "To Serve Man" sort of way ;)
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Serve_Man_(The_Twilight_Zon...
|
| installing ublock Origin should help block most of those nasty
| analytics hoovers
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Consider installing Local Sheriff:
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/local-sheriff...
| It detects these abuses and lets you know.
| chubot wrote:
| I've been using taxact for 4 years, and have found it better
| than TurboTax. This year something seemed off -- quality issues
| and I think they were pushing for more upgrades. More dark
| patterns maybe, or at least grey.
|
| Did something happen? Did they change ownership? Any good
| alternatives to taxact?
| eropple wrote:
| Tax preparation is one of those places I've found that going
| to a _person_ rather than a _website_ actually really pays
| off. TurboTax et al handle simple cases fine but if you have
| a complex situation (I own a home, owned a business, etc etc)
| having a person who 's in the room with you and can directly
| ask you questions and interpret data that you've got on hand
| is invaluable.
|
| My tax preparer is something like $250 a year and reduced my
| liability in a very tumultuous year from about $20K to about
| $9K by understanding what I actually had going on and helping
| to work through it.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| And an actual tax preparer, not a script reader like H&R
| Block.
|
| The first year I moved to the US, I had a whole bunch of
| things going on. Buying a house, working from home, buying
| a hybrid car etc., getting married. I had no real idea
| about the tax system, so saved all our receipts etc., and
| went to H&R Block.
|
| "So what do you want to claim?"
|
| "What can I claim?"
|
| "What do you mean?"
|
| "Here's a bunch of receipts and I can tell you all the
| details."
|
| [vaguely confused look] "Let's go through the app."
|
| And I watched as basically she transcribed our most basic
| information into their in house version of something akin
| to TurboTax.
|
| I could have done that myself.
|
| I complained. And did, eventually, get someone there who
| knew how to not be a glorified transcriptionist.
|
| And then the next year found someone who had knowledge of
| their own.
| chubot wrote:
| Yup, that happened to me. I paid something like $250 for
| a tax preparer who just entered the info into TurboTax.
|
| It hit a weird case and she didn't know what to do.
| Eventually I looked up the actual tax code and told her
| what to do. As far as I remember it was about splitting
| the cost basis over multiple years. I owned some weird
| stock where that came up.
| eropple wrote:
| AFAIK, TurboTax does sell access to a version of their
| software for the script reader, too. ;)
| Penguinx628 wrote:
| I recommend CreditKarma Tax. Intuit purchased them to destroy
| them but was forced to sell that division to square. if
| that's any indicator of how much of a threat they are to
| intuits revenue stream.
| btown wrote:
| A brief reminder, especially when talking about dark patterns,
| that Intuit and its peers have spent 20 years making this a
| reality and cloaking their legal obligations to provide free
| options, as detailed in
| https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-f...
| :
|
| > Internal presentations lay out company tactics for fighting
| "encroachment," Intuit's catchall term for any government
| initiative to make filing taxes easier -- such as creating a
| free government filing system or pre-filling people's returns
| with payroll or other data the IRS already has. "For a decade
| proposals have sought to create IRS tax software or a
| ReturnFree Tax System; All were stopped," reads a confidential
| 2007 PowerPoint presentation from an Intuit board of directors
| meeting. The company's 2014-15 plan included manufacturing
| "3rd-party grass roots" support. "Buy ads for op-
| eds/editorials/stories in African American and Latino media,"
| one internal PowerPoint slide states.
|
| > The centerpiece of Intuit's anti-encroachment strategy has
| been the Free File program, hatched 17 years ago in a moment of
| crisis for the company. Under the terms of an agreement with
| the federal government, Intuit and other commercial tax prep
| companies promised to provide free online filing to tens of
| millions of lower-income taxpayers. In exchange, the IRS
| pledged not to create a government-run system.
|
| > Since Free File's launch, Intuit has done everything it could
| to limit the program's reach while making sure the government
| stuck to its end of the deal. As ProPublica has reported,
| Intuit added code to the Free File landing page of TurboTax
| that hid it from search engines like Google, making it harder
| for would-be users to find.
|
| > What is clear is that Intuit's business relies on keeping the
| use of Free File low. The company has repeatedly declined to
| say how many of its paying customers are eligible for the
| program, which is currently open to anyone who makes under
| $66,000. But based on publicly available data and statements by
| Intuit executives, ProPublica estimates that roughly 15 million
| paying TurboTax customers could have filed for free if they
| found Free File. That represents more than $1.5 billion in
| estimated revenue, or more than half the total that TurboTax
| generates. Those affected include retirees, students, people on
| disability and minimum-wage workers.
| mkr-hn wrote:
| The audacity they have to run ads promising to simplify taxes
| when they're responsible for that complexity is amazing.
| btown wrote:
| Saying "it wasn't me, it was my boss who created the
| situation, I'm just trying to make people's lives better
| within these constraints!" is the best way to calcify and
| perpetuate those constraints.
| musingsole wrote:
| Oof this hits close to home these days. I just want to
| scream "we're doing this to ourselves!!!"
| orcasauce wrote:
| We must keep filing taxes complicated, for the sake of
| Capitalism! This reads like Huxley.
| suzzer99 wrote:
| Sounds like it was not only shady, but incompetent in making
| the calls synchronous.
| freedomben wrote:
| This happened to me with GMail recently. I fat fingered and
| accidentally opened dev tools and saw every single keystroke
| triggered a request back to home. I obviously knew this was
| happening, but seeing it happen in real time really, really
| unnerved me.
| isleyaardvark wrote:
| Gmail autosaves emails as drafts while you're typing, so at
| least in that case there's an excuse.
| egfx wrote:
| Hire me. I'll implement it.
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