Does it count if there's no user interface? Amazon has my email address, I've been a customer since the late-nineties. They keep inventing new email lists and signing me up for them. Each time I get a new "newsletter" it says something like, "You got this message because you're subscribed to the 'Tablet News' newsletter." I click the unsubscribe link to remove myself from it. Along with the unsubscribe link there's a link to my subscriptions. When I go there, it only shows the ones I want (the specific authors I'm following). I want to unsubscribe not only from this latest list you just signed me up for, but also from all future lists you may want to sign me up for. I really don't want to get any unsolicited marketing email from you. Really. I don't want it. Please let me out.
Also stop letting marketplace sellers email me begging for feedback after every marketplace item I accidentally order. I try my best to not order marketplace seller items anymore but when I accidentally do (or buy a gift for someone that is only offered this way) I always end up getting emails from these guys. Are you sharing my email address with them? Does unsubscribing or responding to them share my email address with them? I have no idea. There is never anything useful and it's impossible to unsubscribe from all past and future marketplace emails which is really annoying. Come on, amazon, I really want to love you and continue shopping there but it's getting to the point that I'd rather go to wal-mart! (ok not really)
In general, I'm disappointed how Amazon went from being a store to a "marketplace". Sometimes I want to buy somebody who'll actually curate their list of products and has a reputation to stand behind that they don't want to sully by selling garbage or price-gouging on items they don't normally stock.
For what it's worth, marketplace sellers don't have access to your email address, Amazon relays email messages through their servers.
I am a seller on Amazon. I didn't think I have access to email addresses but you got me curious. I just went into an order and clicked "contact buyer." It gives a contact form that has the receivers address as something like [email protected] with a note "IMPORTANT NOTICE: When you submit this form, Amazon will replace your email address with one provided by Amazon in order to protect your identity, and forward the message on your behalf. Amazon will retain copies of all e-mails sent and received using this service, including the message you submit below, and may review these messages as necessary to resolve disputes. By using this service, you consent to this action."
Personally, I don't contact my buyers at all ever unless its a reply to a question they asked me.
On the email front, I've been getting bizarre emails from Trulia about 1-2 times a month for the last six months. I don't open them but the subject is "1 new rental available in $(my town)." I own a house and I don't remember giving Trulia my email address ever even when I was apartment hunting many years ago. This only started six months ago. I wonder how I got on that list?
Not just Amazon, I am constantly clicking through those unsubscribe links but just get auto-signed up for new lists. Fuck you Amazon and anyone else that does this. I'll buy your junk when and if I need to. Leave me alone and stop wasting my life.
I've also experienced this several times. I just went through the wave of shopping emails that come from Black Friday in the US, and found that most of the time I only unsubscribed from the company's "Black Friday" list. It's a shameful way to get around CAN-SPAM.
Companies know there's a risk of unsubscribes with every email they send. If they have several lists, they ought to show all lists you're subscribed to, with an option to unsubscribe from them all. They might actually keep some legitimate subscribers that way.
> Also stop letting marketplace sellers email me begging for feedback after every marketplace item I accidentally order. I try my best to not order marketplace seller items anymore but when I accidentally do (or buy a gift for someone that is only offered this way) I always end up getting emails from these guys. Are you sharing my email address with them? Does unsubscribing or responding to them share my email address with them? I have no idea. There is never anything useful and it's impossible to unsubscribe from all past and future marketplace emails which is really annoying. Come on, amazon, I really want to love you and continue shopping there but it's getting to the point that I'd rather go to wal-mart! (ok not really)
I've begun adding 1-star reviews when I get requests begging for feedback. Seems like the only thing I can do to discourage the behavior
One pattern that I consider "dark", but don't see in this list, is using loaded options on a dialog box. One that I often see in apps is like:
Rate our app!
<OK> <Not Yet>
Those really get under my skin because the developer is clearly trying to play a psychological trick on me, but it's so brazen and obvious that it just pisses me off. And bigger companies do it too (e.g. Google).
My only nitpick: the author wants the industry to agree on a "code of ethics."
Unfortunately, such exhortations strike me as naive. They are unlikely to work, because the truly bad actors will continue to use dark patterns regardless, putting pressure on all other actors to follow suit. The key challenge is not in getting the good actors to do the right thing, but in preventing the bad actors from doing the wrong thing.
Meanwhile, even sophisticated consumers like HN members pay a cognitive or financial cost to deal with dark patterns every day, which are prevalent throughout the web. Everyone I know is sick and tired of this crap.
The only viable solution I can think of is regulation in the form of a consumer-protection agency, working with the industry, that can fine bad actors up the wazoo.
I agree and that goal sounds similar to the goal of Kill Analytics [1]. "The industry" doesn't even exist as an entity. Gov regulation seems like the only viable way to fix it. But on the other hand, Google AdSense has done a lot to improve advertising online. Popups and bad ads used to be waaay worse than they are now (not that they are okay now). So maybe we do just need a few big players to step up and change things.
What about certifications? Some certifying org can (for a fee) routinely audit websites for whether they use dark patterns. Then, people just know to avoid sites that don't have a good certification, and can report shady stuff.
If they push the envelope too hard, you report, they follow up and can potentially pull the cert. Maybe have browser integration too. (But good luck disambiguating between this and SSL certs for the average person...)
If I'm a developer (say, a junior engineer with my first real entry-level software engineering job out of college), my direct manager (who generally supervises and stringently handholds) basically tells me exactly which features need to be implemented (and often, even how).
I don't have much of a say in which patterns (dark or light) get implemented, and I probably won't have the gull to "stand up" and "rock the boat" as a 22 year old fresh out of school.
It's even worse if I'm married with kids... How do I explain to my wife and children why I lost my job for refusing to implement the product guys' ill-conceived version of "Roach Motel" in the frontend?
This is why I sympathize with the VW lowly engineer "fall guy" whose head met the chopping block for the entire pervasive executive diesel cheat scandal.
A code of ethics is a perfectly acceptable solution actually. Several other institutions have codes of ethics that must be followed and there have been legal adoptions because of them. For example the Hippocratic Oath. Many times doctors have been asked to do harm to patients. Of course it does happen, BUT if a doctor refuses and gets punished in some way for that then a major lawsuit can ensue. Many engineers have codes of conduct as well.
I think this would be much harder to pass, and would be more akin to financial advisers being required to be fiduciaries, but hey, that is now required in the US. What is required for that to happen is mainline support though. But that will be difficult to get. I think this is, like the privacy stuff, is a little too abstract for the average person.
There's no search but I'm curious if LinkedIn is included. I never took screenshots, unfortunately, but I feel like they've had close to 5 in my own experience alone.
LinkedIn is one of the most common examples when talking about dark patterns, their most famous being the number of ways they tried to get you to invite your gmail contacts.
Here's the one of the most egregious examples of LinkedIn's dark UX. The transition from "I'm accepting incoming invites" to "I'm inviting people to connect or join LinkedIn" is intentionally subtle: https://goo.gl/photos/ncnTiMWeSBJfg3rZ6
At the same time, if someone has indicated that they want to give my app a bad review, am I obligated to take them to the review point so they can do it?
Buying tickets with RyanAir is stressful due to these kind of practices. They're less aggressive than in the past, when I wouldn't even continue because I just had zero trust in the company, but they're still sly.
A sneaky one I saw recently is something like:
[ ] Subscribe to newsletter about our services by unchecking this box.
(It doesn't matter whether the box is initially checked or not, the user will be tricked into the desired behavior.)
I don't remember the exact phrasing, and it was much more shrewd than my own, but it relied on a boolean flipping of the value of the checkbox towards the end of the field label. Any user seeding the start of the sentence will leave it in its current state.
Would gofundme's entire brand and business model be considered a dark pattern? They go out of their way to make it feel like a nonprofit, promote campaigns for issues that already have actual nonprofit status/direct donation pages, and do their best to hide their fees (which, last I checked, were actually higher for legitimate nonprofits than for regular campaigns).
This kind of "hall of shame" websites are interesting to me. However, most of the regular users do not know nor care about this stuff.
Well, in a semi-ideal world, there would be a comprehensive "hall of shame" database containing the information about the tricks, problems, dark patterns, etc. for all websites. Then, some helper apps or browser extensions could warn us about these issues while a regular user is browsing.
One of the problems with this idea is that it gives a huge authority to the owner of that database and there would be lots of questions about its neutrality.
In an ideal world we could detect those patterns programmatically but as you hinted, there is the question of "when is it considered a dark pattern and when is it only clever marketing?".
One concrete thing I think can be done right now is to make a Chrome extension that audits the current website on the number of dark patterns and visibly surfaces a score for the website so people can flee from them like the plague/websites-with-the-broken-ssl-padlocks. Vote with our wallet.
Is there a category for grouping notifications such that spammy notifications are lumped in with other important ones you might want to receive?
Google Photos is a big culprit unfortunately with their photo backup. They keep pinging a notification to get me to remove local versions that are backed up in the cloud. I don't want to do that. The only way to remove the notification seems to be disabling all app notifications.
Worse, when you go into settings, they have a variety of settings that all take you into a deeper level of settings when you click them.
Except "Free up device storage."
Clicking that does not take you to a deeper level as expected (despite looking like a nav tree item), but instead actually does the one thing I didn't want to do, with no confirmation dialogue.
Do you even actually have "important" notifications you might want to receive?
Is any automated system more important than your focus?
What I have is, disallow or delete the app or "service" as soon as I receive a "notification" from it, only my wife and family is allowed to light up the led on my phone.
An oft-overlooked aspect of dark patterns is the impact on accessibility.
Ever received a spam email, hunted for the unsubscribe link, and found it in light grey, against a white background? Imagine how much worse that is for someone with low vision. Ditto for pop-up ads with a tiny grey X in the corner.
Many of the dark patterns described in the video rely on hiding/obfuscating opt-outs and these have an even bigger impact on people with visual/processing disabilities.
How about this one in the new uber app: If you disable location services (which recently switched to either "always" or "never", no longer offering "only when open") you can't use your history or saved favorite places to set a location, you have to manually type it out. Couldn't believe they would be so shady just to get location services activated.
After the first time this appeared on HN, I quit LinkedIn and deleted my profile. They still sent me "xxx wants to connect with you".
I'm really getting tired of turning down Amazon Prime on Amazon. I use Amazon less because of this. There are about three extra pages of Amazon Prime ads to click through for every purchase.
I sent them 2 dark patterns in the past which they didn't put; in an email I received long time after inquiring about it one of the developers said they're under the pump and will get to it sometime. And they don't.
Good luck figuring that out though, since the what's new page hasn't been working in pretty much forever and the only way to see if something has been changed is to check each category individually.
And yeah, it doesn't update much. I remember sending in my own examples before, and those never got added either. Kind of wish there was a site about this with a more regular update schedule or something.
My recent experience with LA Fitness, or City Sports, as they call them here in the SF Bay Area, have been similar to what the video describes. However, it was not as painful as I'd imagined it will be. I went to my account page and clicked on the Cancellation Form link (not necessary but recommended). After several screens I got a cancellation form for my account which I printed and mailed using USPS Certified Mail. After two business days I got an email stating that my account will be closed and when my access privileges will end.
Spirit Airlines is an interesting case, though, because like someone else said, they're very up-front about this. Is it still a dark pattern if the company admits it and essentially warns the user?
> they are not mistakes, they are carefully crafted with a solid understanding of human psychology, and they do not have the user’s interests in mind
I dispute this. I work with someone who is a marketing person and very much drawn to dark pattern rubbish. Most recent incident is a good example - a sales promotion where something is added to the cart if the customer buys a certain product. I pointed out that this was a 'dark pattern' and made sure my boss knew that such an idea is illegal in the E.U.
For me the illegality is not something that scares me, I doubt I will go to jail for writing the code, however, using a 'dark pattern' is a problem for me.
I like to think that I am a customer focused person, my marketing clown certainly is not. In fact he cares not one iota about any of the customers, his world view is selfish.
So, I point out the illegal aspect, next thing is that he wants the items given away. I don't see how that makes our products look good and I have no idea how to make money out of making a product and then shipping it to them for free. So again I am not sold on the priority of the project.
Returning to the 'selfish' aspect, my marketing clown does not code or appreciate the effort involved in making the auto-add work. I can do the code for that and think I could get the MVP of it done in a day, with some testing after that. Then there is the thinking through of the unintended consequences - I imagine that we would get plenty of customer service emails if there was a problem with the offer. The UX is also not thought out. I am sure that I could spend all day getting the message to the customer sorted on the website and emails, but if I didn't do that then the whole thing would certainly be 'dark pattern'.
There is nothing clever about my selfish marketing clown and his naive ways. However, he gets a performance bonus based on 'customer acquisition' metrics that the rest of us don't get. He has an interest to not care about anything other than his Google Analytics nonsense, customers, rest of the team, the company making money matters not.
Although anecdotal, this is how 'dark patterns' happen - marketing clowns, their selfish ways, their inability to understand the problem space (because they don't do code or customers) and workplace bullying make these things persist.
Your experience seems to support, not refute, the idea that these are conscious decisions (albeit at a marketing, rather than coding, level, which I think is probably what the original meant) rather than inadvertent bugs.
That was interesting. My reaction was "is this actually a dark pattern, or just designed by a complete idiot?" Because the user trying subscribe and the user trying to UNsubscribe both have a problem in understanding what is going on there. Somebody should get an award for that.
This presentation is great. I think a good next step on the path toward ending unethical UX could be in creating an international ethics review board for it.
I know it sounds silly, but this is how a lot of decisions are agreed upon by many large organizations, and help encourage involvement and following the rules. See W3, ICANN, ESRB, IETF, etc.
The "BUXE", or Board for User eXperience Ethics (just my name idea) could be founded by a group of consenting UX designers, companies, and organizations. Together they would vote on and establish UX design principles that would be up for review every year or so.
The BUXE will accept fees for reviewing a website's adherence to their ethics and would give ratings to them based on how well they follow the guidelines. The resulting site can then publish their BUXE rating on their site.
Individual developers could be given honor status if they are particularly vocal or involved in ensuring the development of ethical UX that could be accolades for them to brag about (something important to developers). It's a good resume booster, anyway.
While I'm familiar with the site already, I'd love to have an RSS feed of newly added submissions. Unfortunately, when I click on Recently Added I get a list with pattern definition links that all 404, and no link to the actual submission.
That and a api where you could `GET darkpatterns.org/patterns/www.linkedin.com` and get a list. Would be great for building a nice browser plugin with.
There is no "works for everyone" method to stop this. You can vote with your wallet, and support vendors that act ethically, or act in whatever way you are OK with.
When this type of UI disappears from the internet, then you will know that the majority of consumers agree with your viewpoint. Until then, people keep buying those insurance upgrades, and not caring(if they cared, we wouldn't be in this situation).
If it all seems glib, that's because it is glib. People are taking advantage of other people, just below the threshold where those victims care enough to do something about it. This is the world we live in. I'm not sure how to end this on a positive note.
> When this type of UI disappears from the internet, then you will know that the majority of consumers agree with your viewpoint. Until then, people keep buying those insurance upgrades, and not caring(if they cared, we wouldn't be in this situation).
In a situation where you are legally compelled to buy insurance and essentially all providers do this that's completely wrong.
[+] [-] saberworks|9 years ago|reply
Also stop letting marketplace sellers email me begging for feedback after every marketplace item I accidentally order. I try my best to not order marketplace seller items anymore but when I accidentally do (or buy a gift for someone that is only offered this way) I always end up getting emails from these guys. Are you sharing my email address with them? Does unsubscribing or responding to them share my email address with them? I have no idea. There is never anything useful and it's impossible to unsubscribe from all past and future marketplace emails which is really annoying. Come on, amazon, I really want to love you and continue shopping there but it's getting to the point that I'd rather go to wal-mart! (ok not really)
[+] [-] Pxtl|9 years ago|reply
But maybe that's just me.
[+] [-] nommm-nommm|9 years ago|reply
I am a seller on Amazon. I didn't think I have access to email addresses but you got me curious. I just went into an order and clicked "contact buyer." It gives a contact form that has the receivers address as something like [email protected] with a note "IMPORTANT NOTICE: When you submit this form, Amazon will replace your email address with one provided by Amazon in order to protect your identity, and forward the message on your behalf. Amazon will retain copies of all e-mails sent and received using this service, including the message you submit below, and may review these messages as necessary to resolve disputes. By using this service, you consent to this action."
Personally, I don't contact my buyers at all ever unless its a reply to a question they asked me.
On the email front, I've been getting bizarre emails from Trulia about 1-2 times a month for the last six months. I don't open them but the subject is "1 new rental available in $(my town)." I own a house and I don't remember giving Trulia my email address ever even when I was apartment hunting many years ago. This only started six months ago. I wonder how I got on that list?
[+] [-] bottled_poe|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] austinl|9 years ago|reply
Companies know there's a risk of unsubscribes with every email they send. If they have several lists, they ought to show all lists you're subscribed to, with an option to unsubscribe from them all. They might actually keep some legitimate subscribers that way.
[+] [-] devicenull|9 years ago|reply
I've begun adding 1-star reviews when I get requests begging for feedback. Seems like the only thing I can do to discourage the behavior
[+] [-] novia|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] swehner|9 years ago|reply
Did you try unsubscribing from all their newsletters?
[+] [-] aaron695|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cle|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cs702|9 years ago|reply
My only nitpick: the author wants the industry to agree on a "code of ethics."
Unfortunately, such exhortations strike me as naive. They are unlikely to work, because the truly bad actors will continue to use dark patterns regardless, putting pressure on all other actors to follow suit. The key challenge is not in getting the good actors to do the right thing, but in preventing the bad actors from doing the wrong thing.
Meanwhile, even sophisticated consumers like HN members pay a cognitive or financial cost to deal with dark patterns every day, which are prevalent throughout the web. Everyone I know is sick and tired of this crap.
The only viable solution I can think of is regulation in the form of a consumer-protection agency, working with the industry, that can fine bad actors up the wazoo.
Does anyone here have a better suggestion?
[+] [-] soared|9 years ago|reply
[1] https://hello-kill.github.io/
[+] [-] SilasX|9 years ago|reply
If they push the envelope too hard, you report, they follow up and can potentially pull the cert. Maybe have browser integration too. (But good luck disambiguating between this and SSL certs for the average person...)
[+] [-] Hydraulix989|9 years ago|reply
If I'm a developer (say, a junior engineer with my first real entry-level software engineering job out of college), my direct manager (who generally supervises and stringently handholds) basically tells me exactly which features need to be implemented (and often, even how).
I don't have much of a say in which patterns (dark or light) get implemented, and I probably won't have the gull to "stand up" and "rock the boat" as a 22 year old fresh out of school.
It's even worse if I'm married with kids... How do I explain to my wife and children why I lost my job for refusing to implement the product guys' ill-conceived version of "Roach Motel" in the frontend?
This is why I sympathize with the VW lowly engineer "fall guy" whose head met the chopping block for the entire pervasive executive diesel cheat scandal.
[+] [-] godelski|9 years ago|reply
I think this would be much harder to pass, and would be more akin to financial advisers being required to be fiduciaries, but hey, that is now required in the US. What is required for that to happen is mainline support though. But that will be difficult to get. I think this is, like the privacy stuff, is a little too abstract for the average person.
[+] [-] serg_chernata|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bduerst|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sethbannon|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] redwards510|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rajathagasthya|9 years ago|reply
And the linked article to it: https://medium.com/@danrschlosser/linkedin-dark-patterns-3ae...
[+] [-] mangeletti|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] st3v3r|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrisdone|9 years ago|reply
A sneaky one I saw recently is something like:
[ ] Subscribe to newsletter about our services by unchecking this box.
(It doesn't matter whether the box is initially checked or not, the user will be tricked into the desired behavior.)
I don't remember the exact phrasing, and it was much more shrewd than my own, but it relied on a boolean flipping of the value of the checkbox towards the end of the field label. Any user seeding the start of the sentence will leave it in its current state.
[+] [-] covercash|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aamederen|9 years ago|reply
Well, in a semi-ideal world, there would be a comprehensive "hall of shame" database containing the information about the tricks, problems, dark patterns, etc. for all websites. Then, some helper apps or browser extensions could warn us about these issues while a regular user is browsing.
One of the problems with this idea is that it gives a huge authority to the owner of that database and there would be lots of questions about its neutrality.
[+] [-] Cafey|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xster|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shostack|9 years ago|reply
Google Photos is a big culprit unfortunately with their photo backup. They keep pinging a notification to get me to remove local versions that are backed up in the cloud. I don't want to do that. The only way to remove the notification seems to be disabling all app notifications.
Worse, when you go into settings, they have a variety of settings that all take you into a deeper level of settings when you click them.
Except "Free up device storage."
Clicking that does not take you to a deeper level as expected (despite looking like a nav tree item), but instead actually does the one thing I didn't want to do, with no confirmation dialogue.
[+] [-] antocv|9 years ago|reply
Is any automated system more important than your focus?
What I have is, disallow or delete the app or "service" as soon as I receive a "notification" from it, only my wife and family is allowed to light up the led on my phone.
[+] [-] gnicholas|9 years ago|reply
Ever received a spam email, hunted for the unsubscribe link, and found it in light grey, against a white background? Imagine how much worse that is for someone with low vision. Ditto for pop-up ads with a tiny grey X in the corner.
Many of the dark patterns described in the video rely on hiding/obfuscating opt-outs and these have an even bigger impact on people with visual/processing disabilities.
[+] [-] jcomis|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Animats|9 years ago|reply
I'm really getting tired of turning down Amazon Prime on Amazon. I use Amazon less because of this. There are about three extra pages of Amazon Prime ads to click through for every purchase.
[+] [-] AdmiralAsshat|9 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6301378
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12180072
[+] [-] oferzelig|9 years ago|reply
Despite being a good site, it has been last updated in 2013: http://darkpatterns.org/whats-new/
I sent them 2 dark patterns in the past which they didn't put; in an email I received long time after inquiring about it one of the developers said they're under the pump and will get to it sometime. And they don't.
[+] [-] CM30|9 years ago|reply
http://darkpatterns.org/trick-questions/
Good luck figuring that out though, since the what's new page hasn't been working in pretty much forever and the only way to see if something has been changed is to check each category individually.
And yeah, it doesn't update much. I remember sending in my own examples before, and those never got added either. Kind of wish there was a site about this with a more regular update schedule or something.
[+] [-] BatFastard|9 years ago|reply
I may stay away from LA Fitness just because of this article.
[+] [-] mrgreenfur|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jedmeyers|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] exolymph|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Theodores|9 years ago|reply
I dispute this. I work with someone who is a marketing person and very much drawn to dark pattern rubbish. Most recent incident is a good example - a sales promotion where something is added to the cart if the customer buys a certain product. I pointed out that this was a 'dark pattern' and made sure my boss knew that such an idea is illegal in the E.U.
For me the illegality is not something that scares me, I doubt I will go to jail for writing the code, however, using a 'dark pattern' is a problem for me.
I like to think that I am a customer focused person, my marketing clown certainly is not. In fact he cares not one iota about any of the customers, his world view is selfish.
So, I point out the illegal aspect, next thing is that he wants the items given away. I don't see how that makes our products look good and I have no idea how to make money out of making a product and then shipping it to them for free. So again I am not sold on the priority of the project.
Returning to the 'selfish' aspect, my marketing clown does not code or appreciate the effort involved in making the auto-add work. I can do the code for that and think I could get the MVP of it done in a day, with some testing after that. Then there is the thinking through of the unintended consequences - I imagine that we would get plenty of customer service emails if there was a problem with the offer. The UX is also not thought out. I am sure that I could spend all day getting the message to the customer sorted on the website and emails, but if I didn't do that then the whole thing would certainly be 'dark pattern'.
There is nothing clever about my selfish marketing clown and his naive ways. However, he gets a performance bonus based on 'customer acquisition' metrics that the rest of us don't get. He has an interest to not care about anything other than his Google Analytics nonsense, customers, rest of the team, the company making money matters not.
Although anecdotal, this is how 'dark patterns' happen - marketing clowns, their selfish ways, their inability to understand the problem space (because they don't do code or customers) and workplace bullying make these things persist.
[+] [-] JadeNB|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tempest1981|9 years ago|reply
* Do I check the item if I want to unsubscribe from it?
* Or do I uncheck the items I don't wish to receive?
50-50 chance -- which I'm sure they love. Clicking "Update" gives no feedback either, just reloads the page.
[+] [-] kagamine|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wingerlang|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zpallin|9 years ago|reply
I know it sounds silly, but this is how a lot of decisions are agreed upon by many large organizations, and help encourage involvement and following the rules. See W3, ICANN, ESRB, IETF, etc.
The "BUXE", or Board for User eXperience Ethics (just my name idea) could be founded by a group of consenting UX designers, companies, and organizations. Together they would vote on and establish UX design principles that would be up for review every year or so.
The BUXE will accept fees for reviewing a website's adherence to their ethics and would give ratings to them based on how well they follow the guidelines. The resulting site can then publish their BUXE rating on their site.
Individual developers could be given honor status if they are particularly vocal or involved in ensuring the development of ethical UX that could be accolades for them to brag about (something important to developers). It's a good resume booster, anyway.
Plenty of other ideas.
[+] [-] woogiewonka|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shostack|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eroiusghs|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] module0000|9 years ago|reply
When this type of UI disappears from the internet, then you will know that the majority of consumers agree with your viewpoint. Until then, people keep buying those insurance upgrades, and not caring(if they cared, we wouldn't be in this situation).
If it all seems glib, that's because it is glib. People are taking advantage of other people, just below the threshold where those victims care enough to do something about it. This is the world we live in. I'm not sure how to end this on a positive note.
[+] [-] emodendroket|9 years ago|reply
In a situation where you are legally compelled to buy insurance and essentially all providers do this that's completely wrong.