from Hacker News

How deceptive design is used to compromise your privacy and how to fight back

by yoaviram on 2/15/24, 1:14 PM with 56 comments

  • by snide on 2/15/24, 1:34 PM

    I'm one of those people that tries as best I can to use Google products while also managing my privacy. One fun thing is watching how privacy controls roll out across Google products. As an example... I turn my watch history off on YouTube. That stuff rolls out immediately on youtube.com, but took months to make it to the Android version on my Shield TV. There were definitely gap months where I'd see settings that were supposedly turn off in some places, weren't actually turned off in others.

    The design patterns can get pretty aggressive. Google right now makes my youtube.com homepage blank, asking me to turn on my watch history. A lot of time this is presented in a way not to mention privacy, but to instead promote a "feature". "Turn this feature on", not "Turn off your privacy". You get quite a lot of roadblocks when you turn off settings like this, making the products pretty hard to use.

    It's nearly impossible to keep up with and figure it all out, and I'm a UX designer by trade! A lot of these dark patterns are the reasons I've moved more and more to alternative tools like Kagi and Fastmail...etc.

  • by speckx on 2/15/24, 1:54 PM

    Also, look at the deceptive patterns of the Hall of Shame, which has hundreds of examples of deceptive patterns used by companies worldwide.

    https://www.deceptive.design/hall-of-shame

  • by WaitWaitWha on 2/15/24, 4:29 PM

    I just watched someone complete their tax return online through a commercial service.

    At login they were asked for a phone number, which she refused and chose "skip". When she got to the end of the filling, just before submission, the system refused to move on without a mobile phone where text could be sent. Oncethe text message was sent, moved on. No way to remove the number from the account.

    There is no need for the number. Deceptive design in the beginning then extortion at the end.

    There are people without mobile phones by choice and by force.

  • by yoaviram on 2/15/24, 2:33 PM

  • by Animats on 2/15/24, 6:23 PM

    Here's the link to report spam from a Google email account.[1] This is for non-Google customers. Try to find it from Google's help pages.

    When you get there, you have to parse the email by hand, extracting subject, header, and body, and paste those into separate form blocks. That could be trivially automated, but no, that would make it too easy.

    Gmail is about as spam-heavy as Hotmail at this point. I'm tempted to route everything not whitelisted from Google to the junk folder.

    [1] https://support.google.com/mail/contact/abuse

  • by kls0e on 2/15/24, 2:40 PM

    The slides include a collection of e-mail templates on how to react to different deceptive patterns - useful! Thanks.

  • by peter_d_sherman on 2/15/24, 8:35 PM

    "Deceptive Design" -- now that phrase is going into my 2024 lexicon!

    (Although, we should always consider Hanlon's Razor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor): "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity" when levelling allegations that a given company or companies have intentionally engaged in "Deceptive Design".)

    Still, "Deceptive Design" is a very descriptive phrase given its terseness...

    But there must also be a "corollary phrase" -- to describe the same effect while reflecting non-malicious intent, AKA just plain stupidity and/or unintentional ignorance...

    How about:

    "User Intent Non-Preserving User Interface" (UINPUI)?

    Anyway, from a linguistic standpoint and used properly in the correct contexts, "Deceptive Design" could be a very useful phrase...

  • by foundart on 2/15/24, 1:57 PM

  • by nottorp on 2/15/24, 3:28 PM

    Isn't squeezing all the info in a bunch of slides "requiring a disproportionate effort" ?

  • by pettycashstash2 on 2/15/24, 1:26 PM

    Actually never thought about scrubbing my data from anywhere. How many folks take an active approach to managing their “footprint”? I’m sure there are fringe cases where this becomes important but in general practicallly I have not done anything to wipe my data.

  • by kjkjadksj on 2/15/24, 5:02 PM

    Speaking of deceptive design, anyone know how to get apple to effectively “deny and do not ask again” for things like socket filters? A real pain to have to deny a cisco popup 3 times in a row every time I reboot the machine. Then again this is how macos handles things like itunes account prompts every time I brush against the play pause buttons (ask 3 times in a row like a toddler might then forget for next time).

  • by otteromkram on 2/15/24, 4:38 PM

    Almost impossible to do if you are a job seeker. Either you comply with a company's privacy agreement...or you don't apply for the role.

    I'm still not sure why companies want to send SMS messages to candidates. Email or phone calls aren't fast enough? Come on.