37 ms·

I was let go for refusing to deploy a dark pattern

• gccs 5y ago
  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.
  • polynomial 5y ago
    This hasn't been implemented by any teams I've been on. If companies were doing this, I believe (or at least hope) we would hear about it from implementors.
    • nitrogen 5y ago
      I believe (or at least hope) we would hear about it from implementors. I was acquainted with some black hats in junior high and high school. Guessing how they are as adults, I'm pretty sure you can always find someone who will do it for the lulz, if not for the money.
    • progmetaldev 5y ago
      There are form builders out there where you have the option to record data as it is entered. It is simply a checkbox in the form builder.
• andybak 5y ago
  Not enough information here to know if they made the right call. I can imagine situations where this is to the user's benefit and the company could handle the data ethically. Example: Situations where the user would be likely to have very unreliable connection and be on the page with the email field for some time with other data entered that they wouldn't want to lose. It might seem a bit contrived but I've had similar scenarios in the past. EDIT - as others mentioned localStorage is a better solution for this problem.
  • danpalmer 5y ago
    I think there's a very reasonable general expectation on the web that your data isn't used until you've clicked submit/save/etc. I don't think that this practice could be claimed to have "informed consent", even if the privacy policy mentions it explicitly. You're right there are places where this sort of thing can be useful, but they're rare, and could even be handled client-side in many cases.
    • JohnBooty 5y ago
      I think there's a very reasonable general expectation on the web that your data isn't used until you've clicked submit/save/etc I definitely have this expectation and would be angry if it was violated. I wonder: do non-engineers have this expectation? In 2021? I've been involved with web development since the more or less earliest days. Back when websites were mostly static pages, and eventually spouted some forms here and there. But, would a non-greybeard engineer have this expectation today now that UX is generally so different and "app-like" and anything you see in your web browser can basically be assumed to be in constant communication with the server(s)? Please note that I don't think the current state of affairs is really an improvement. In fact, I more or less hate the "modern" web. I'm just curious about how user expectations have changed.
  • IggleSniggle 5y ago
    Then save it to local storage
    • tgv 5y ago
      Then you can't send them reminder emails, can you? No, this was pretty sleazy, and quite probably in violation of the GDPR.
  • Kaze404 5y ago
    That's why LocalStorage exists.
  • benjaminjosephw 5y ago
    Possibly beneficial and useful features can still be dark patterns. Whether or not there is any potential user-value is irrelevant to the ethics of design decisions like these. If you're dealing with user data you should never compromise a basic respect for that user's intent. Designing for implied consent where consent should be explicit (e.g. sharing personal data) is unambiguously a dark pattern.
• etripe 5y ago
  > 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?
  • 3pt14159 5y ago
    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.
    • eloff 5y ago
      But how many people enter their full email and then back out of the form? This seems like a small thing at the end of the day, especially for 3 emails that doubtless contain an unsubscribe link. Edit: That got a lot of push back. I'm just saying, this is not the hill I'd die on. At best it would spare some small single digit percent of visitors 3 unwanted emails.
      • JustResign 5y ago
        Small things can still be unethical.
      • Phenix88be 5y ago
        It's not out of the form. It's out of the email fields. So if you press tab to go to the next field, the email is send somewhere without notice.
• danpalmer 5y ago
  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.
  • danpalmer 5y ago
    I did have a similar example to this a year ago. We were partnering with an affiliate marketing agency, and they asked us to include their tracker on our website. When probed about how the tracker worked, they revealed that it worked by scraping everything that looked like an email address and sending it to their servers in order to attribute user signups, and they required it on every page. I said that was a gross violation of our users' privacy and that we would only implement our own significantly restricted server-side tracking that didn't reveal any user info. Their response implied they really weren't challenged on their practices often at all.
    • dtech 5y ago
      Was this in US or EU? I wouldn't be surprised if it is EU but theoretically this should be so GDPR non-compliant that Merkel personally throws you out.
      • ashtonkem 5y ago
        CCPA probably makes that illegal, which gives devs with a conscience a nice out: “that is wildly illegal if we do it to anyone in CA, we will have to develop it my way for them anyways, and it’s cheaper to support only one system”
      • danpalmer 5y ago
        EU. Absolutely non-compliant and I don't think they could have cared less. We had to get special sign of from their senior leadership to implement the server-side tracking because it meant they could lose out on revenue if we didn't get it right. Ironically the server-side version bypassed adblockers/tracking protections (all we did was ping back after checkout with the total order value, no user data), so it was likely that they would make more revenue given than ~50% of users have some sort of blocking in their browsers.
• kube-system 5y ago
  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.
  • dhimes 5y ago
    Totally agree. I think a lot of the "evil" that happens in business is done by well-intended people who make incremental decisions while trying to compete. Some of them probably make decisions they don't like, but because if they don't their competitors will eat their lunch, they have to. In my experience, honest business folks don't mind honest regulations. It keeps the playing field level.
    • Cipater 5y ago
      *well-intended people who make incremental decisions while trying to compete May I take issue with this statement? Why do you say they are well-intended when you subsequently say that the intention is to make money? (compete to make money)
      • kube-system 5y ago
        Because those concepts are not antithetical? We all feed our families somehow.
      • dhimes 5y ago
        I think you can view money not as the end goal, but as the means to accomplish your goal. If I have a goal to help people become educated, I use business as a way to organize resources (including people) to accomplish the goal. Money is necessary to make that happen. Even for open-source projects, money is necessary. I respectfully disagree with Milton Friedman's oft-quoted line, that the purpose of a business is to maximize value for its shareholders, at least if we set value = money.
  • karaterobot 5y ago
• dt3ft 5y ago
  Respect.
  • codingclaws 5y ago
    thanks
• weeboid 5y ago
  The bigger smell is no version control :D Saving emails `onBlur()` is probably not a dark pattern.
  • that_guy_iain 5y ago
    You're getting downvoted while being right. A dark pattern is tricking the user. Not saving the data they enter. But most people around here call anything that is distasteful a dark pattern.
    • dharmaturtle 5y ago
      > Dark Patterns are tricks used in websites and apps that make you do things that you didn't mean to, like buying or signing up for something. https://www.darkpatterns.org/ https://www.darkpatterns.org/
      • that_guy_iain 5y ago
        Yea it isn’t tricking them into something. It’s capturing data they’ve input.
        • retor 5y ago
          It's not tricking, but it is deceptive since they haven't chosen to submit. The current mental model of forms are to save data entries when you actively submit. Yes, there are some settings panels that automatically save changes, but I have never seen it for forms. If there's an submit button on that form then that would be an even stronger signification to the user that nothing will be sent to the servers until you click that button.
    • surround 5y ago
      It is a dark pattern - it tricks the user into thinking their data won't be submitted until they click "submit," but instead saves it right away. It would only not be a dark pattern if the form clearly said "your email address will be uploaded to our servers immediately after typing it."
• Tenoke 5y ago
  The impressive thing here isn't that some random company is doing it but how many don't recognize it is a dark pattern even when told it is one on HN.
  • raxxorrax 5y ago
    Some larger companies have trained psychologists to nudge people to rationalize their deeds. You aren't just working for an ad company. You are working for the benefit of manind. You bring joy to everyone and restore justice in this world... with ads.
    • belval 5y ago
      It's THE thing that I don't like about modern corporate culture, most of us (like +95%) aren't building a new tomorrow or addressing rising inequalities. We build stuff to make money. That's it. That's the goal. It makes me angry when you have internal corporate propaganda trying to spin this as a greater mission. Then you have the coworkers that drink the koolaid and talk as if you were in a cult.
      • sdoering 5y ago
        Thanks. Exactly that. I once was lucky (OK expected to attend the all hands) listening to the world lead of our business unit talking about how we would make the world a better place by making hospital emergency rooms more efficient by applying a Uber model to it. How Uber was the epitome of making a bad experience better for the end user and how this company's mindset should be applied to the world. The ER experience was just an example that would be ripe for disruption in his view as it had not changed in the last few decades from a "user perspective". I filed his talk under "corporate bs for 500" but sadly our local leadership drank the cool aid. I do not have a problem with making money. Or helping companies do so. I know that this is the center piece of capitalism. Great if you provide added value with your offering but making money is paying our mortgage in the end. But for the sake of it. Don't try to brainwash me into believing that what I do makes the world a better place in any significant way.
• theshadowknows 5y ago
  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
  • ev0lv 5y ago
    But what about making it easier to auto-fill member's information into a contract? (sarcasm)
• perfunctory 5y ago
  > 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.
  • 3pt14159 5y ago
    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.
  • prophesi 5y ago
    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.
    • colejohnson66 5y ago
      The saying “a sucker is born every minute” kindof applies here. Just because you and a majority of people care about ethics, doesn’t mean every programmer does. And all it takes is one who doesn’t for the company to be able to implement it. The free market only works to an extent, and harm to consumers is a valid reason for the government to step in.
      • 5y ago
• phatbyte 5y ago
  > They had no version control. Had to read this two times and check the year of the article to make sure this wasn't from 2001
  • Quarrelsome 5y ago
    i mean, even without the dark patterns that's enough to justify quitting.
  • a2tech 5y ago
    Hacker News ghost story I work with clients every day that don't have version control. Some of them are even using PHP!
    • elwell 5y ago
      Do they at least work on files locally? Or do they ssh in to modify the PHP file?
  • cactus2093 5y ago
    Also the use of "remote" to mean contractor legitimately confused me for a second, as if it never crossed the author's mind that a full-time employee could be remote.
• belval 5y ago
  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?
  • that_guy_iain 5y ago
    Well, who says they're going to send you a newsletter? It could be used by sales to contact you directly to ask why you didn't proceed. Instantly, that is what I assumed the email was for.
• josefresco 5y ago
  Similar but not exactly the same... Zoominfo sells a tool that will "auto fill" visible or hidden form fields based on the user's initial input. https://www.zoominfo.com/solutions/formcomplete https://www.zoominfo.com/solutions/formcomplete The tool is marketed specifically as a way to reduce the number of "visible" form fields. At least in this case, the user has to actually submit the form.
  • robocat 5y ago
    Does Zoominfo get the browser to autofill a bunch of fields that are obscured from the user? Interesting...
    • josefresco 5y ago
      Yes. You can and are encouraged to make forms with just a few fields, and let Zoominfo auto-fill the rest. When my client made the initial request I responded with "I don't know if that's possible OR legal" and then a couple weeks later they sent me Zoominfo welcome emails and asked to integrate into their web forms. FWIW, my clients' forms actually display the fields (none are hidden) so I at least can sleep a little better at night.
  • DecoPerson 5y ago
    Crap… I just hit the “Accept all cookies” button on this site on Chrome iOS. Did my browser just autofill a bunch of fields and submit my info to them?
• javajosh 5y ago
  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. I'm still proud of my answer.
  • ridaj 5y ago
    ? 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.
    • option_greek 5y ago
      And they would probably have passed regardless. No distractions and screens probably means no ads and that's most likely a no no for the former do no evil company.
      • ridaj 5y ago
        I suspect that, with their bet on cloud in particular, they're hiring in many places where ads don't matter. Even in the mobile OS world, where ads is eventually where they make some of the money, they have a clear adoption challenge first...
      • handrous 5y ago
        You forgot the other thing they love: humanity-scale dragnet surveillance (to feed "the algorithms"). If it can spy on lots and lots and lots of people, they might still be interested.
    • anshorei 5y ago
      But how will you show the kids ads then?
• JohnBooty 5y ago
  Thank you for having strong ethics. But, what a bizarre dark pattern. How many users: 1. type out a complete email address 2. and then decide at the last moment to not hit "submit?" Who even does that? Like 0.00000001% of all users? I've been using the web since the mid 90s and I don't think I've ever done this. Ethics aside, it's hard for me to believe that this dark pattern even yielded a useful return. To be perfectly clear, I'm not defending this dark pattern. It's bad. I'm just questioning its efficacy.
  • illnewsthat 5y ago
    I’ve done this myself, and it’s typically because I will want to go through the checkout process to see the total cost of something (including shipping which wasn’t shared on the item page). I’ll use auto fill to save time and quickly click through to the page that finally shows the full price, then I will back out. More recently, instead of auto fill I take extra time to type a fake email address just to prevent the “lost cart” marketing emails that were mentioned in the article.
    • JohnBooty 5y ago
      Me too, but the author describes something different. You say that you "click through to the page that finally shows the full price." So, you are explicitly submitting multiple times. There's a reasonable user explanation that your information would be received by the server. In the author's example, they're describing something more insidious -- saving the user's information before they submit the form, thereby subverting user expectation.
      • beckingz 5y ago
        If I haven't consented to receive your marketing emails or have not entered into a business arrangement by purchasing something, I do not expect to receive emails even if I expect that my information has been received by the server.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• akagusu 5y ago
  There is no ethics in business anymore, in Tech industry and any other industry. The right to buy food and pay your bills is what you get from your payment if, and only if, you are willing to compromise your own ethics. If you start to make your work decisions based on ethics it will be really hard for you to stay at your current job or get a new one. Unfortunately, this is the world we live now.
  • bittercynic 5y ago
    Do you think there are some exceptions to this rule? I have the impression that grocery retailer Costco is relatively good in terms of respecting their workers and customers, and I think that is one factor in their success. I'd be interested in learning about other companies that have priorities beyond maximizing this quarter's numbers, or learning why my impression of Costco is wrong.
    • akagusu 5y ago
      I think some exceptions are small/medium businesses, specially small businesses. If you look at the majority of small businesses not only in America but all over the world, they don't even make profit, they just pay the bills, they don't have the mindset of grow at all cost. About Costco, I really don't know, but I know some big companies can have ethics because I've worked for one. It was the best place I ever worked. Unfortunately, it is rare these days.
  • bserge 5y ago
    Anymore? It used to be worse.
    • akagusu 5y ago
      Do you think it was worse? Why?
  • that_guy_iain 5y ago
    What sort of ethics do you have that need to be comprised to work in tech?
• gameswithgo 5y ago
  Many years ago I was asked about adding a feature to our website, which was a shopping portal for eyeglasses, that would bring up a popup when the user tried to leave the site. I immediately said I would not do it. I didn't get let go but the look the manager gave me was one of shocked disbelief, I imagine it was strike one. I quit not long after. The manager was from a big corporation (Luxottica) that had bought us recently. It seems relatively normal that the kind of people who achieve positions of power at large companies just have no respect for other humans. It makes me sad sometimes.
  • scotcha1 5y ago
    there's probably a lot more context, but this is a pretty common marketing feature some examples: https://github.com/carlsednaoui/ouibounce https://github.com/carlsednaoui/ouibounce https://www.hubspot.com/products/marketing/exit-intent https://www.hubspot.com/products/marketing/exit-intent i like how this page describes them more as 'needy' than 'dark', since dark seems to imply immoral https://www.nngroup.com/articles/needy-design-patterns/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/needy-design-patterns/
    • yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
      I was curious how that works, so I clicked into the ouibounce repo and read the README. I still don't get how it works, but I enjoyed how they flirt with self awareness: > it's very easy to create something spammy-looking. ...and then they list "good" uses that are... all spammy.
      • nitrogen 5y ago
        I still don't get how it works These actions can be used to infer possible intent to leave: scroll up (to reveal address bar on mobile), move mouse toward top of viewport (to move mouse toward address bar), swipe down (to reveal address bar on mobile), loss of UI focus, probably others. I hate these patterns, and they are 100% appropriately described as dark. I and the other devs spent months at one place arguing with a PM about how janky and broken the third-party intent-to-leave detector they injected using Google Tag Manager without dev involvement made our app feel. (GTM was the product that convinced me Google gave up on not being evil)
• mwill 5y ago
  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.
  • fidesomnes 5y ago
    I am trying to find the unethical part of this, care to enlighten us?
    • thehappypm 5y ago
      Grabbing images of women from social media, and aggregating them without their consent, is not necessarily illegal, but it's certainly exploitative and creepy.
      • wutbrodo 5y ago
        This is just restating the question. "Exploitative and creepy" doesn't have a whole lot of semantic content beyond "wrong". I took a whack at articulating _why_ it's wrong while not quite fitting a clear definition of malfeasance here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27632365 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27632365
      • willcipriano 5y ago
        The pictures are one thing and bad enough. Including location and links to profiles could make you a party to stalking or worse, and that is quite unethical.
• tenerifevisitor 5y ago
  > They had no version control. I wouldn’t have accepted the position in the first place. If I really would have needed the job, I would have left as soon as possible (6 months max). They did him a favor by letting him go.
• k2enemy 5y ago
  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.
  • codingclaws 5y ago
    Thanks. Yes, it is my forum.
• wing-_-nuts 5y ago
  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'.
  • jareklupinski 5y ago
    I mean... in a way... it is "serving its people"... in a "To Serve Man" sort of way ;) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Serve_Man_(The_Twilight_Zone) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Serve_Man_(The_Twilight_Zon... installing ublock Origin should help block most of those nasty analytics hoovers
  • btown 5y ago
    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-fight-to-stop-americans-from-filing-their-taxes-for-free 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.
• TX0098812 5y ago
  + karma
• tlogan 5y ago
  Sadly this is standard for certain set of services and websites. I think some of these widgets similar to intercom do this. In short, I assume that the sales team is just following industry practices for that vertical / type of the sites. If not, then it is your job to explain the best practices for your industry (i.e., how these kinda of things will generate a lot of spam, will make potential customers weary the service, etc.).
• fc373745 5y ago
  to be honest, that's pretty tame as far as dark patterns go. If a user had already typed their email onto the field, then the user had at least some intent to sign up whatever the user wanted to sign up for. This makes what ad trackers and ISPs do with how we browse seem like war crimes if you were to call this a 'dark pattern'
  • surround 5y ago
    A dark pattern is tricking the user into doing something they didn't mean to do. I don't expect or intend my email address to be uploaded before I click submit. I expect it to happen after.
• slumdev 5y ago
  Congratulations. Getting fired for doing the right thing might hurt in the short term, but it's the right thing to do and eventually (perhaps already) becomes a great story to tell.
• jart 5y ago
  Where is it written that it's a dark pattern to collect form information before the user presses submit? Maybe the company wants that information because sometimes the form breaks, or the user isn't able to figure it out, and they want to be able call that person on the phone or write them an email and be like, hey, can we help you fill out the form? That's perfectly reasonable in my opinion. But if the intent was to sell that email address to marketers who would put it on as many nonconsensual spam lists as possible, well, then that was going to happen regardless of whether or not the user pushed the button, because the whole website is a dark pattern which means leaving was the ethical thing to do, so let's not blame technology when the problem was people.
  • surround 5y ago
    The dark pattern is saving the email without informing the user or asking for permission to do so. Normally, permission is given when the user clicks "submit," but if you save the email before they click submit, it's a dark pattern.
  • ryankrage77 5y ago
    > they want to be able call that person on the phone or write them an email and be like, hey, can we help you fill out the form? That's perfectly reasonable in my opinion. How is the reasonable? The real-world equivelant is going to a shop, looking around, and then leaving without buying anything and going home. If a store representative then knocked on my door and offered to help me find whatever I was looking for, that would be extremely creepy. Sure, it might work out if someone did get stuck with a form, and actually does want someone to help them with it, but that's a tiny perentage of people. The real reason is not altruism, it's to make money.
• Abimelex 5y ago
  If the regarding company is EU based or offering their services also in EU you are obliged to report them to data protection authorities.
  • notanormalnerd 5y ago
    I don't know why this hasn't come up in any of the threads. With the GDPR this is illegal. Your data officer would be furious and your VP probably out of a job for getting a 100.000€ fine. There is no reason you need that when the user did not submit it, so you have no explicit consent. As a developer in Europe I live the GDPR. I love my privacy and the privacy of the users. All the marketing and sales stuff has been proofen to not work very well, so what the heck?
• polynomial 5y ago
  > They had no version control. In my mind this gives me some relief that the company was a small outlier, which is not to say I don't think there's a problem here, which is that morally objecting to work assignments doesn't seem to be a thing in the corporate world.
• rsweeney21 5y ago
  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.
  • amelius 5y ago
    Why not fix it for everyone with an IP address that's not in your boss's area?
    • cvak 5y ago
      You think the boss even knew how to use that feature, or hell even had an Xbox? He just saw excel sheet with cancellation numbers, and asked someone what is happening.
    • AlexCoventry 5y ago
      Because subscriptions would keep dropping, the reasons would be investigated, and there's a high risk that the people responsible for the fraud would do time?
      • amelius 5y ago
        Jail time for refusing to implement a dark pattern?
        • AlexCoventry 5y ago
          No, for defrauding your employer. Having your heart in the right place is not a reliable legal defense.
• strogonoff 5y ago
  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.)
  • maxwelljoslyn 5y ago
    I really dislike this because it violates the user's assumption that the action they are in control of, "send message," represents a hard barrier between committing and not committing to their wording. Unsavory.
  • hiidrew 5y ago
    Can confirm that Salesforce integrated chats do this
    • AlexCoventry 5y ago
      I wonder whether enterprise slack does.
    • hipjiveguy 5y ago
      really? how do you know? and which "chats" ?
  • vosper 5y ago
    > 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. Related Related PSA: Tools like Logrocket record full-fidelity videos of your entire session on a website. They're great for debugging. It also means you should assume that every website you use has a video of everything you did that people can scrub and search through (it's more than a video actually, it's capturing and re-rendering the DOM, network traffic etc... like I said, amazing for debugging)
• nscalf 5y ago
  I previously worked on couple of companies that flirted with the line on some of these dark patterns. As far as they go, this one is pretty benign. If I recall correctly, I was for doing this pattern. There is enough intent there (putting your whole email into the user form) that it really doesn't feel like abusing the user. That being said, me and my coworker had to fight back and refuse to build a few other dark patterns. The real issue is the legitimate companies that take it way past dark patterns. Credit rating bureaus that scrape 100% of your data and the data of anyone you've ever been near, Facebook stalking you across the internet, etc. As far as I'm concerned, if it's okay for Facebook to do this exact dark pattern on everyone in the world, I can make a stupid directory site have a little more juice.
  • rytor718 5y ago
    I don't see how this is benign in any sense, but I may be missing something. If I type my email into a box on a website ...and decide a moment later NOT to press "Submit". My expectation is that my email was NOT saved to the server. I didn't consent. How is this pretty benign?
    • whynaut 5y ago
      It sounds like they mean relative to the stuff they were working on. Very colloquial.
  • surround 5y ago
    If it's "pretty benign" to save a user's email before they click submit, then it wouldn't be a big deal to inform the user that you just saved their email instead of trying to silently hide the fact.
• surround 5y ago
  A bit off-topic, but does anybody have any examples of websites which use this dark pattern? I am interested in trying to disable this "feature" client-side for the sake of privacy.
  • henriquez 5y ago
    You could disable JavaScript, otherwise there's no general way of preventing this type of behavior -- as far as I can imagine there are too many different ways of scooping up user input data to generally block via a browser add-on.
  • jefftk 5y ago
    Once you have entered your email address on a page with JS and the page has sent any additional network traffic, you have to assume that the server has your email address if they want it. JS is just too complex to offer any other guarantees.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• yoursunny 5y ago
  In 2007, I had a script on my website that records every click and every mouse move. When my classmates are reading my webpages, I'm watching a video simulation of their mouse moves. My website doesn't contain any textbox, so there's no personal data except IP address. Nevertheless, I more or less know who's reading my page because every student has a static IP. Nowadays, I don't collect mouse moves anymore, but I have navigator.sendBeacon() for video playback behavior.
  • codegeek 5y ago
    You just described Tools like HotJar.
• stevebmark 5y ago
  Many forms autosave, I don't see this as a clear example of a dark pattern.
• mbostleman 5y ago
  What would be the problem with naming the company here if everything said is the truth and there is no IP being disclosed or other issues like that? This is similar to when I see people posting in local contexts (like on FB groups) that so and so local company provided terrible service but the poster doesn't want to name names. What good is done if names aren't named? If we have a name, then things get fixed. Otherwise there is no feedback loop so there's really no point.
  • brodock 5y ago
    People don't want to risk get sued for nothing
• atum47 5y ago
  I have one comment about this: If a bridge or a building collapses they would go after the engineer who signed the project. Same with accountants and other professions. We should start holding tech companies and software engineers accountable as well. Is your software spying on people? Using dark patterns? Well, I think you should face the consequences of your actions. Software are as real as buildings or bridges now a days. Storing the users passwords as clear texts? Using admin:admin for credentials? Come on...
• philote 5y ago
  I used to work for a company that did this, but it was supposedly covered by their client sites' TOS. The client site would install our tag, and our JS code would listen for emails to be entered, and would send them to our backend to collect and cross-reference with visitor on our other clients' sites. This allowed us to send emails to visitors who left sites with buying anything, even if they never entered their email on that site.
• ChicagoDave 5y ago
  A reminder that WE are the product. Our emails, our phone numbers, what we're shopping for, what we drive, where we live, who we voted for....all of this is in a ginormous Oracle marketing database that they rent to other companies. Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon...they all do the same thing. They track us and every digital footprint we make.
• yumraj 5y ago
  > apologies, but I don't want to work on this task because it's a dark pattern. While I understand the intent, words matter. If those were the real words that were used, yes it will lead to souring of relationship. Unless we notice a systemic pattern, accusations should wait and that sounds like an accusation. Perhaps the client was indeed trying to do something customer friendly and they did not know better. It would have been better if the OP had offered a solution rather than excuse of them engaging in dark patterns and refusing to work on it. And, if the client had not taken that solution, yes, I will agree there is something nefarious. But till then, I wouldn’t have jumped to that conclusion so quickly.
• parsnips 5y ago
  At Seamless circa 2010 we were asked to make the default sort order for restaurants appear by how close they were to the next tier of the contract. More orders = More Margin. The tech team at the time was entirely located in Utah at the time, and all of us were repulsed at the idea. We countered with suggestions for improvement and made it clear the project would not be worked on: - You can make a "promoted" restaurant section above the fold - The UX concerns since users expect some reasonable ordering. Like distance from location or alphabetical. We didn't get fired, and it was really scary. I appreciate standing up for ethics and principles. bravo.
• klyrs 5y ago
  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.
• egfx 5y ago
  Hire me. I’ll implement it.
• nice2meetu 5y ago
  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).
  • 3GuardLineups 5y ago
    life must be beyond exhausting if thats enough to make your wife furious
• titzer 5y ago
  Reading the comments here, I am surprised how many people are outraged over the collection of an email address. You're going to flip when you find out what they know about your location from your mobile phone.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• dm319 5y ago
  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.
  • freedomben 5y ago
    I have been waiting for doctors and other medical staff, especially in ERs, to stand up about the insane over-charging that takes place. Everyone seems to have a story, but in mine before I agreed to anything I asked how much it would be. I was given an estimate of around $1,200 for a scan, decided to proceed because I knew I had $1,800 in my HSA. Turned out they charged me almost $4,000 and I ended up in collections. I would have never, ever agreed to the scan if they had been honest.
    • ticviking 5y ago
      Get them to put it in writing. Also you can usually mail a check with a short letter explaining you are paying the estimated cost and caching the check is the same as honoring that estimate.
    • MiddleEndian 5y ago
      Medical billing is simply insane. A month or so after an emergency visit to the hospital, I started getting random bills in the mail ranging in $50-$100 amounts. I went back to the hospital and asked them what the total was so I could just pay them the full amount right there, which was only about $1000. They simply wouldn't tell me. They told me to wait for all the bills. As I paid them off, there was no indication of whether I had completed all the payments. Guess I missed one, as I also ended up in collections a year later for $50. My credit score was harmed instead of theirs.
    • dreamcompiler 5y ago
      Last time I got a mortgage it turned out I had a couple of dings on my credit record because of unpaid medical bills (totaling a few hundred dollars) that I had missed and that had gone to collections. The banker processing my mortgage application said "It's not a problem. Everybody in America has unpaid medical bills. We ignore those." I got the mortgage.
• sli 5y ago
  > 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. In my experience it's because the marketing team has already sold the dark patterns.
• edgeform 5y ago
  "Employee surprised when they wouldn't perform their work duties and were let go because of it." We get it, you personally think dark patterns are here to destroy humanity. Lesson learned, don't shit where you eat. There's a lot I don't like about my work too but I'm not about to risk my stability just to make a point to some people on a blog post.
• croes 5y ago
  Is it really a dark pattern to secretly store the email address? Aren't dark patterns about tricking the user to something he doesn't want to do? This is just illegal data storage.
  • t0mbstone 5y ago
    I mean, technically, you could put something in the web site terms and conditions to the effect of, "all user input is recorded for quality assurance purposes", and then it wouldn't be illegal anymore. How is this any different than when telephone conversations are recorded on phone support lines, or when a video game records all user input and streams it to the remote server? It's all about disclosure up front. As long as the web site has done that properly, it's legal, right?
• panic 5y ago
  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?
  • president 5y ago
    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.
  • BSVogler 5y ago
    Lobby for something like GDPR. Half the stuff in this thread is illegal in the EU.
• Supermancho 5y ago
  Experian's FreeCreditReport.com (in)famously, within the company, sells off your email many times IF THAT IS ALL YOU FILL OUT on the site.
• baron_harkonnen 5y ago
  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.
• neycoda 5y ago
  If it's been implemented, show the URL and where the code is.
• PostThisTooFast 5y ago
  You know what's a "dark pattern?" Using the phrase "dark pattern." We have plenty of words in English to describe underhanded behavior. Such as "underhanded behavior."
• kazinator 5y ago
  > The first thought that came to my mind was - I'm not going to be here much longer. And it's not because I quit (I probably should have). I would say, no! If you voluntarily quit instead of being let go, there can be certain disadvantages, depending on the employment laws and such in your jurisdiction. Unless you have something lined up, of course; then it is largely moot.