Dark patterns show up all over the web, nudging people to subscribe to newsletters, add items to their carts, or sign up for services.
How Facebook and Other Sites Manipulate Your Privacy Choices by Arielle Pardes in Wired Magazine
But, says says Colin Gray, a human-computer interaction researcher at Purdue University, they’re particularly insidious “when you’re deciding what privacy rights to give away, what data you’re willing to part with.” Gray has been studying dark patterns since 2015. He and his research team have identified five basic types: nagging, obstruction, sneaking, interface interference, and forced action. All of those show up in privacy controls. He and other researchers in the field have noticed the cognitive dissonance between Silicon Valley’s grand overtures toward privacy and the tools to modulate these choices, which remain filled with confusing language, manipulative design, and other features designed to leech more data. [..]
Many of these dark patterns are used to juice metrics that indicate success, like user growth or time spent. Gray cites an example from the smartphone app Trivia Crack, which nags its users to play another game every two to three hours.
Those privacy shell games aren’t limited to social media. They’ve become endemic to the web at large, especially in the wake of Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation.
