It’s funny how they only want to repeatedly confirm your decision when you give the answer they don’t want.
Every time my Facebook messenger app updates it asks me to confirm my phone number (which it already has through some other method). It employs multiple dark patterns to trick me into confirming, and because of this I’ve very nearly done so by accident.
This stuff might be profitable in the short term but many of us see through it — especially the younger generations — and it’s eroding any trust you may still have with people.
Companies need to cut this shit out ASAP if they want to be trusted in the future.
In addition to the info itself being valuable to them, metadata such as the age of the info is also an important attribute to consider when placing a value on this info.
Cutting this out puts a company at a disadvantage to competitors. This is a case where the government "of the people and for the people" should step in and write some real legislation, and enforce it. Unfortunately, "of the people and for the people" is effectively ancient history now, they're far too busy bickering over Russian trolls and fulfilling their donors wishes. What a sad state of affairs.
I'm not against regulation on principle, but how specifically would you write something against these patterns? I have a hard time seeing how to describe them in a general way - and "I know them when I see them" doesn't make good law.
Write the law vaguely and make punishments potentially scarily harsh, the general idea that if companies would like to continue to play dumb farmer, they better hope they don't run into someone with a strict personality. In law, there is the notion of both the latter and the spirit of the law, so this notion isn't unprecedented.
You might think this is a bit crazy, and you'd be correct, but it's nowhere near as crazy as thousands of things in the actual reality of our current legal system (banks crashing the global financial system, yet no one was guilty of anything, black men being executed at point blank range and the cop walking away, etc etc etc etc etc).
Every time my Facebook messenger app updates it asks me to confirm my phone number (which it already has through some other method). It employs multiple dark patterns to trick me into confirming, and because of this I’ve very nearly done so by accident.
This stuff might be profitable in the short term but many of us see through it — especially the younger generations — and it’s eroding any trust you may still have with people.
Companies need to cut this shit out ASAP if they want to be trusted in the future.