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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

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.
  - IshKebab 5y ago
    The GDPR isn't enforced at all for anyone but the biggest players.
deleted 5y ago
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ehnto 5y ago
Dark patterns aren't a line in the sand that's for sure. At what point does a newsletter pop-up become a dark pattern? There are some concrete examples, but it can also be pretty nuanced. I think newsletter pop-ups are always egregious, but a business owner can have a very hard time grasping why. They can think they're building stuff people like, and they can often act like they're simply herding sheep. Users are ephemeral zombies to some, and from that lens, it's totally fine to capture them with sneaky tactics.
- hirundo 5y ago
  I wouldn't call over aggressive marketing a dark pattern. As with the newsletter pop-ups, they aren't shady or underhanded or misleading or coercive, they're just in your face. I often find them obnoxious and repulsive and they drive me away from a site, but they're in the light, out in the open, not pretending to be something they aren't. I think there is a fairly bright line in the sand for defining a dark pattern, and the line is between hiding and being open, between being misleading and straightforward, between trying to force someone to do something and seducing them with plain intentions. The later behavior can still really suck, without being dark.
  - ehnto 5y ago
    I disagree, simply. There's so many novel UX patterns in websites and apps, it's impossible that you've got a clear idea of what is or isn't a dark pattern in every circumstance. Uber Eats used to have a "$0" option for tipping, but removed it, it's no longer clear if you're going to be giving a tip or not, but if you don't click anything you don't actually give a tip. Is that a dark pattern? I think so, because the UX makes it seem like you have to select something, and that no isn't an option. But it's not hard to argue in the negative, since doing nothing will not take money from you.
    - whynaut 5y ago
      You seem to give a pretty good reason why it's a dark pattern, and a pretty flimsy one for why it's not. I think it's not as ambiguous as you say.

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.
- IshKebab 5y ago
  The GDPR isn't enforced at all for anyone but the biggest players.

deleted 5y ago

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ehnto 5y ago

Dark patterns aren't a line in the sand that's for sure. At what point does a newsletter pop-up become a dark pattern? There are some concrete examples, but it can also be pretty nuanced. I think newsletter pop-ups are always egregious, but a business owner can have a very hard time grasping why. They can think they're building stuff people like, and they can often act like they're simply herding sheep. Users are ephemeral zombies to some, and from that lens, it's totally fine to capture them with sneaky tactics.

hirundo 5y ago
I wouldn't call over aggressive marketing a dark pattern. As with the newsletter pop-ups, they aren't shady or underhanded or misleading or coercive, they're just in your face. I often find them obnoxious and repulsive and they drive me away from a site, but they're in the light, out in the open, not pretending to be something they aren't. I think there is a fairly bright line in the sand for defining a dark pattern, and the line is between hiding and being open, between being misleading and straightforward, between trying to force someone to do something and seducing them with plain intentions. The later behavior can still really suck, without being dark.
- ehnto 5y ago
  I disagree, simply. There's so many novel UX patterns in websites and apps, it's impossible that you've got a clear idea of what is or isn't a dark pattern in every circumstance. Uber Eats used to have a "$0" option for tipping, but removed it, it's no longer clear if you're going to be giving a tip or not, but if you don't click anything you don't actually give a tip. Is that a dark pattern? I think so, because the UX makes it seem like you have to select something, and that no isn't an option. But it's not hard to argue in the negative, since doing nothing will not take money from you.
  - whynaut 5y ago
    You seem to give a pretty good reason why it's a dark pattern, and a pretty flimsy one for why it's not. I think it's not as ambiguous as you say.