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.
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.
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'.
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.
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.
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?
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
I was fired once for consistently resisting sleazy practices as well as defending my team from abuse from leadership.
The big realization I had, which I'm surprised I didn't have earlier: if you don't want to do gross things, don't work for B2C startups.
The only way to get an edge when trying to grow a B2C startup is to start continually start squeezing whatever revenue you can from your users. This is inevitable even if you start with a solid product as your base.
We would track metrics on how many users were upset with how royally we screwed them with fine print and as a long as that number was small enough that it didn't impact monthly revenue "leadership" didn't care. We had no product vision at all, it was just iterate random ideas to get more money, and most of the ideas that stuck involved dark patterns that means the user didn't realize they were taking a bad deal.
I was honestly smiling when I got fired, it was as though I had passed some secret test that a company like that would not want me.
My experience with B2B has been much better, especially if you have enterprise customers. In the B2B space customers can easily be paying 100k-1M a year, and, if you treat them right, will be your customer for many, many years. It typically makes economic sense to treat the with respect, and make products that are beneficial to them. Dark patterns, and sleazy tricks have a serious penalty because losing a contract can be very, very painful.
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.
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.
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.
? 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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?
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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".
>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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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).
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.
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?
[+] [-] rsweeney21|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] macd|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] wing-_-nuts|4 years ago|reply
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'.
[+] [-] btown|4 years ago|reply
> 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.
[+] [-] wizzwizz4|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] handrous|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jareklupinski|4 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] freedomben|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chubot|4 years ago|reply
Did something happen? Did they change ownership? Any good alternatives to taxact?
[+] [-] suzzer99|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] strogonoff|4 years ago|reply
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.)
[+] [-] klyrs|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mwill|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dm319|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] theshadowknows|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kube-system|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] baron_harkonnen|4 years ago|reply
The big realization I had, which I'm surprised I didn't have earlier: if you don't want to do gross things, don't work for B2C startups.
The only way to get an edge when trying to grow a B2C startup is to start continually start squeezing whatever revenue you can from your users. This is inevitable even if you start with a solid product as your base.
We would track metrics on how many users were upset with how royally we screwed them with fine print and as a long as that number was small enough that it didn't impact monthly revenue "leadership" didn't care. We had no product vision at all, it was just iterate random ideas to get more money, and most of the ideas that stuck involved dark patterns that means the user didn't realize they were taking a bad deal.
I was honestly smiling when I got fired, it was as though I had passed some secret test that a company like that would not want me.
My experience with B2B has been much better, especially if you have enterprise customers. In the B2B space customers can easily be paying 100k-1M a year, and, if you treat them right, will be your customer for many, many years. It typically makes economic sense to treat the with respect, and make products that are beneficial to them. Dark patterns, and sleazy tricks have a serious penalty because losing a contract can be very, very painful.
[+] [-] danpalmer|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] gccs|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] javajosh|4 years ago|reply
I'm still proud of my answer.
[+] [-] ridaj|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] matsemann|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jefftk|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacobsenscott|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] deckard1|4 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] phatbyte|4 years ago|reply
Had to read this two times and check the year of the article to make sure this wasn't from 2001
[+] [-] panic|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] president|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BSVogler|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] etripe|4 years ago|reply
> 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|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whalesalad|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] deepsun|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] iovrthoughtthis|4 years ago|reply
if yes, it’s a dark pattern.
if no, it’s not.
i side with, yes.
[+] [-] dev_tty01|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] perfunctory|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] prophesi|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tut-urut-utut|4 years ago|reply
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".
[+] [-] NaturalPhallacy|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] 3pt14159|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Silhouette|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] matheusmoreira|4 years ago|reply
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|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] shrimp_emoji|4 years ago|reply
Why assume they have principles?
[+] [-] teclordphrack2|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] nice2meetu|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] k2enemy|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] codingclaws|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] belval|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tenoke|4 years ago|reply