13 ms·

The slippery slope

520 points by justinph 13y ago

captionobvious 13y ago
This article is complaining about the steps apple took to prevent guid tracking but framing it as being done explicitly to trick the user.
- casca 13y ago
  I would suggest that the article makes a very good case for it being done to explicitly trick the user. Apple particularly gives a huge amount of consideration for making an intuitive and obvious UI. It's not a big leap to assert that in this case, they've made it as difficult as they can to opt out while still offering the choice.
  - captionobvious 13y ago
    More than likely it was done to protect the users privacy while keeping the exact same user experience. The protections were made behind the scenes with additional options made available to the user, but disabled by default. The transitions from guid had the potential to break many apps so encouraging users to disable it would have likely caused many unintended side effects in addition to cluttering the ui and annoying users with unknown options.
    - andybak 13y ago
      I've read this three times now and I'm still not sure I get it...
      - hack_edu 13y ago
        When on the shakier side of a heated discussion of anything Apple, you can always fall back upon the nebulous "user experience" argument.
      - e3pi 13y ago
        >I've read this three times now and I'm still not sure I get it... For about ten years now, every time I use Paypal for an eBay payment, I'm interrupted to choose a $10.00 off opt-in for setting up credit, I have to click-thru this every time. By now, I've done this several hundreds of times. I'm just a fish trying to stay out of their double-trap dark pattern slippery slope trammel net.
        kwijibob 13y ago
        I've been on google+ since the beginning (2nd half of 2011). For the whole 18-20 months whenever I have gone to google+ on the web it has first had an obstacle "Find your friends" page asking me to spam all my contacts about google+. It still does it even today. There is no opt-out or "stop asking me to do this" checkbox. Even though I am an active plus user with posts and comments, it still treats me like a first timer. I'm trying to get into google+ but there is no way I'm going to spam my friends. That it has been doing this to me hundreds of times for nearly two years is unbelievable.
        e3pi 13y ago
        Another one. HN subject titles often link to the New York Times. Not having a subscription and offended with their offensive dark screen blinding pop-up `dark pattern' `hook' --free, or otherwise-- I now only read the respective HN comments. NYT coverage is usually good, I miss it, but now BBC, Reuters, Guardian, rt, Der Spiegel, HN, are my primary news feeds.
      - mcguire 13y ago
        Near as I can tell, he's saying that the advertisement tracking toggle (located under General > About, down past the version numbers, MAC addresses, etc.), named "Limit Ad Tracking" and defaulting to "Off" is actually another brilliant example of Apple's premier, user-centric interface experience design. But I've never really figured out the "double-negative, Newspeak is good for you!" thing, so I'm not sure.
    - mhaymo 13y ago
      And how does this solution achieve that better than putting the option in the Privacy menu, labelled "Disable unique identification (this may break some apps)"?
- rogerchucker 13y ago
  The unintuitive layering and double negative wording clearly tells me that Apple tried to have it both ways.
casca 13y ago
To disable Ad Tracking under IOS, go to Settings > General > About > Advertising > Limit Ad Tracking to On This is a worthwhile read (with excellent examples) on the ubiquitous "Click here to not receive third-party messages" pattern.
- ashishgandhi 13y ago
  This fall onwards it'll be: Settings > Privacy > Advertising.
  - tomp 13y ago
    Source?
    - yoshokatana 13y ago
      I can confirm this. The language is "limit ad tracking" instead of "disable," which worries me a bit.
      - sjwright 13y ago
        I think a better word would be "refuse", as it more accurately portrays the situation. It too is not perfect though, as your "refusal" can still be ignored.
        krichman 13y ago
        Ugh, I hate these. Instead of disabling it at the OS level, where they should do it; they create a "let's give unethical companies another bit of information" option.
        rmidthun 13y ago
        Actually, in this case "Limit" is perfectly accurate. The only result of checking this is that the application must call advertisingTrackingEnabled before using the identifier. If enabled is NO, then the developer can use the identifier for "frequency capping, conversion events, estimating the number of unique users, security and fraud detection, and debugging". Notice that compliance with these restrictions is almost impossible to determine. http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/AdSupport/Reference/ASIdentifierManager_Ref/ASIdentifierManager.html http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/AdSupp...
peter_l_downs 13y ago
Long, but worth reading — a great overview of shady techniques that many startups may feel are worth employing to bump their growth stats.
- mooreds 13y ago
  It was even more interesting to me as a set of 'canaries in a coal mine'. If you are working for a company and start to see many, or one, of these patterns, it should serve as awake up call. Move on or don't, but be aware of the corporate behavior.
nissimk 13y ago
This reminds me of the android ui for turning of WiFi when the screen is off. It used to be on one of the settings pages. Now you have to go to settings, WiFi, menu, advanced. There are numerous articles in the Google index of people having trouble finding this option. It makes a WiFi only tablet last for a very long time without recharging if you don't use it too much. Why would they want to hide that option?
- lnanek2 13y ago
  Kind of prefer it is hidden myself. As a developer with apps that sometimes upload and the like in the background, I don't want countless emails from users who have flipped that switch and can't get their scores to post or whatever.
purplelobster 13y ago
I wish there was a browser plugin or something that displays all the blackhat manipulation a site employs as you visit it, and give alternative options.
zallarak 13y ago
Very well written. When you turn against your customers' welfare, you're almost always going down a path of failure in the long run.
- z-factor 13y ago
  Banks seem to be doing ok.
  - rocky1138 13y ago
    For now. It's only a matter of time before a startup or two breaks that industry down just like they have for many others.
    - Wingman4l7 13y ago
      Things like regulatory capture make it hard for small players to get started in entrenched industries. Some examples: telecommunications (getting leases on existing pipes to sell your services), meat processing (look at the regs that small producers like Polyface Farms have to comply with), car manufacturing (look at the opposition Tesla is facing trying to sell direct to the consumer) -- and yes, banking.
    - sudonim 13y ago
      I'm a happy customer of both Simple.com and USAA. Both are very customer focused banks. The industry is being broken down, just really really slowly.
      - studentrob 13y ago
        Just curious, what benefits do you get from simple.com that USAA does not provide? I looked at it in the beginning but it didn't seem to add anything, perhaps that's changed.
        sudonim 13y ago
        That's a great question. I like the experience of simple. I get push notifications when I swipe my card. I enjoy the "Safe to spend" amount that takes into account my goals. Photo check deposit is great too. It's early days for them, but I like backing that horse. USAA is a great company. They give you ATM fee reimbursements which is a huge benefit over simple. I feel guilty getting them since they have to eat that cost. In dealing with them, they're always pleasant and friendly, but they have policies like photo check deposit is only available if you're ex-military. Hope that helps!
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
namenotrequired 13y ago
Great article. This reinforces the "Data informed, not data driven" mantra - you can optimise a feature on your site for a single metric but always take the human effects into account. It also shows the importance of talking to your users in person. An A/B test may prove that ticking a box by default will get so and so many more users opting in, but it can't show you the look on their face when they realize what you just did to them.
nathas 13y ago
All I'm going to say is that even though it's awful The Ladders have all those tricks, they're successful. Not saying the ends justify the means, but I wonder how their business would look otherwise.
- rmc 13y ago
  Well that's the kinda the point of Dark Patterns? Companies use them because they work. They are unethical, but they achieve success (in the short term at least, sometimes long tem). This is why there is law, to level to play in field so the ethical groups can be not disadvantaged.
  - kvcrawford 13y ago
    Except, law is invariably perverted to provide an advantage to a select group.
    - rmc 13y ago
      Sure, bad law. I'm not saying law is perfect or flawless. There's a ton of bad law. We should fix the bad law. Unfortunately making law is tied up to politics and PR and minefield of stupidity that is.
- mcguire 13y ago
  Did you happen to read the section on Experts Exchange?
mariusz331 13y ago
It's funny. I'm on the phone trying to reach a student loan representative right now. I keep pressing 1 for English, 4 for a student loan representative, 1 again for the type of loan, then I'm back to pressing 4 for a loan representative. It's an infinite loop! I try hitting 0 for an operator but then I'm prompted to give a 4 digit extension for the party I want to reach.
- toyg 13y ago
  It could be that the pool of operators for your type of loan is empty (i.e. they're all offline or engaged), and the app is set to automatically let you try again with some other department. Just going with Occam here, but I've seen a couple of callcentre call-routing systems and the potential for misconfiguration is fairly high.
  - andrewflnr 13y ago
    Hanlon, actually. Just for the sake of terminology: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor . It keeps me sane.
- effbott 13y ago
  Most automated phone systems will connect you to an operator if you press 0 repeatedly (as in 10 to 20 times in a row). There's almost always a way to get around automated phone systems.
  - mattm 13y ago
    Or when you call don't press anything. The system may assume you have an old rotary phone that can't make the correct tones and automatically forward you to a person. You can also try http://gethuman.com/ http://gethuman.com/
- Joeri 13y ago
  Student loans by themselves are an example of a business anti-pattern in my opinion. Schools and governments should figure out funding models that do not charge the students huge sums of money because it's perfectly possible to organize an education system without that (as many countries demonstrate). It is immoral to drive students into debt. Or, if you want a more rational reasoning: nowadays higher education is essential to gain access to knowledge worker jobs which are becoming the foundation of the post-industrial economy. Nations should want the best quality of students in those jobs, not just those who can afford the entry ticket. Therefore it makes sense from an economic perspective to amortize the cost of entry (higher education) across the entire taxpayer base and leave education as a purely merit-driven system where the best students get the most economically significant jobs.
hugi 13y ago
How intentional.
Fuzzwah 13y ago
Enjoyed the article, but I had to read it using the Clearly extension because the native web page is extremely laggy for me. I'm on a Win8 machine running current Chrome. It seems like such a simple design but hot damn does it chug when I scroll.
- petemc_ 13y ago
  Works fine with safari on my 2008 macbook.
- KnightHawk3 13y ago
  Same on Windows 7 with Chrome (IGP with a Mobile 1st gen i3 processor however)
- HNaTTY 13y ago
  That's probably because it's a 15MB page including all the assets -- Somebody doesn't believe in jpegs. The page still downloaded for me in 2.5s though, so I have to give the guy some credit for having a beefy host.
  - kingnight 13y ago
    I think it may have to do with the fixed 'border' the entire page has. It is interesting though how Chrome chokes and Safari glides, though with choppy repositioning of the fixed border on scroll completion.
- rogerchucker 13y ago
  Don't wanna start an off-topic conversation but in spite of being somewhat of a Google fanboy I'm actively using (and have set as default) Safari instead of Chrome on my 2010 macbook pro for any page or site that is "heavy". My usage of Chrome has now shrunk to scenarios that involve heavy dependence on omni-search.
- JoshuaRedmond 13y ago
  I'm glad I wasn't the only person who had that issue. Strangely it works perfectly on the mobile version of Chrome for Android, but it grinds to a halt on the tablet version. This is especially strange as I have a Padfone 2 (phone connects to a tablet dock) , so the hardware is the same, and Chrome just gets relaunched in tablet mode when it's docked. Maybe due to the size of images being served being varied on screen size.
khawkins 13y ago
One large claim made here is that while Dark Patterns may increase subscription rates, they hurt brand image. Are there any scientific studies measuring the magnitude of such damage? Perhaps the occasional irritation is worth 5 others "duped" into accepting more advertising.
6cxs2hd6 13y ago
I thought in the EU you're legally required to do opt-in. You're not permitted to do opt-out. How can the UK Post Office do opt-out? Is this some UK exemption from the EU law? Or is it the typical government exemption from its own law (like e.g. how politicians exempted themselves from the US CAN-SPAM law)?
- eterm 13y ago
  Third party must be opt-in, but first party can be opt-out, that's why they do the alternate "opt-out opt-in" thing. In fact a lot of companies I've come across do it this way, you see it on physical forms too.
- Adirael 13y ago
  Speaking of Europe, lately I've been using iOS on my native tongue and the translation is "Limitar seguimiento..." I don't know what's behind that ellipsis, but the direct translation of what I see would be "Limit tracking", without double negative.
- kawsper 13y ago
  Depends on the country, I think it is up to all member states to implement and manage the laws internally. My former employer did the following "trick" to boost the amount of newsletter subscriptions (and angry customers): In Denmark you are allowed to create a competition where you write "By participating in this competition you will be subscribed to our newsletter". And then they write in the legal text under the form that you agree to them (and their mother-company) contacting you on phone, email and SMS. And you also agree that two separate companies owned by the same company is allowed to contact you. You are also allowed to leave the following checkbox checked as default, making it opt-out: [x] Subscribe me to the newsletter.
- CaptainZapp 13y ago
  Why, it is opt-in. Just so confusing and misleading that a lot of people will opt-in by mistake. The directive does not say that you must find a literal opt-in button on a web site.
alexdimitrov 13y ago
in iOS7 Advertising is in Privacy. Maybe apple are taking notes.
- mullingitover 13y ago
  Stole the words right out of my keyboard. This is fixed, just not deployed widely yet.
kamakazizuru 13y ago
way too many images - whats the TLDR on this?
- jlgaddis 13y ago
  TL;DR: RTFA.
suyash 13y ago
So what is the final state of the switch be if you want your self NOT to be tracked or reduced the amount of tracking : OFF or ON ?
- bostonvaulter2 13y ago
  You want it to be ON
lifeformed 13y ago
Does this site really need to be over 15MB large?
- Skalman 13y ago
  Well, considering 97% percent of the page load is images (average size: 400 kB), and the page contains slides that explain and complement the article... yeah, I think it does!
  - lifeformed 13y ago
    The page renders really laggy for me. Seems like it'd benefit from dynamically loading in the images, or at least user more compression on the images. Also, the images have been shrunken to fit the page. They should just be that smaller size to begin with; you could probably get the page down to 8MB with minimal loss.
csallen 13y ago
I'm going to nitpick a bit here, mostly because it's entertaining to play devil's advocate on a topic that's always met with such one-sided responses on HN (in this case: dark patterns). My question is: Why should a company make it easy for people to do exactly what it doesn't want them to do? Sure, outright trickery and lies are almost unarguably immoral. And the author definitely identifies many examples of that. But there are other instances where I just can't agree with classification of the UX as a dark pattern. Let's take The Ladders, for example. In order to cancel, you have to fill out a form with a few required fields. What a shady, underhanded, and downright spiteful trick! Or is it? Most cancellation forms online will take you through an intermediary confirmation step, anyway. What's so evil about requiring a small form to be filled out? The questions are directly relevant to the act of canceling, and if you truly don't give a shit, you can fill it in with gibberish. Even if you give honest answers, you could be done with this form in literally 5 seconds. It almost certainly took you longer to fire up your browser and navigate to their site, anyway. My point is: The company is not attempting to trick you or obfuscate the truth. They know that the presence of the form will likely lower their cancellation rates by a marginal amount, yes, but there's nothing immoral about lowering cancellation rates. And the form isn't nearly long enough to be considered difficult or unreasonable, so it's not like they're attempting to frustrate people into staying. In the end, it convinces some people to change their minds, but nobody gets hurt. Compare that to, say, The Ladder's decision to auto-renew monthly subscriptions while hiding that fact at the bottom of the page in small gray font. Or to email subscriptions with no unsubscribe link. Or to burying opt-out checkboxes within gigantic forms. In these cases, companies are outright tricking people.
- Sealy 13y ago
  To give an example: In line with Google's mission statement of "Don't be evil", I figure that it could extend to "Don't be annoying". > My question is: Why should a company make it easy for people to do exactly what it doesn't want them to do? Because its just plain annoying to users. Running a business and designing your application / system to trick people into behaving in a certain way is one thing, being transparent is another. I think users these days are becoming a lot more educated and wiser to these techniques, as a result their loyalty is beginning to side with companies that offer a more honest level of transparency.
na8ur 13y ago
Very nice article. ethics! this is the problem of our society. the next article should be about making people sensible. How to reward them for been responsible. The thing is people don't care about their live. Managers change jobs, people accept NSA... Might be intresting to compare Customer-Live-Time-Value und Business-Model-LiveTime-Value. What if they knew that the bomb will be nightmare? I would love to see numbers? How about calculating Update-Costs of the SW to "how about having a new business model". The aren't these "dark pattern" businesses VC driven?
aspensmonster 13y ago
>"Brand relationships are like human relationships." No. Brands, corporations, and other legal fictions are not human. They're tools explicitly designed to generate profit. This is their fundamental purpose, and as such, they can never bear any significant resemblance to human relationships. Aside from that, it's certainly an excellent write up. And I like the term too: Dark Patterns.
- grey-area 13y ago
  I found this statement confusing at first too, but perhaps the way to look at it is that most customers do treat their relationship with brands by analogy to human relationships, whether they should or not. We get mad at brands, vow we'll never use them again, break up with them, come back to them, expect them to behave coherently, criticise the behaviour of one representative as if it were the firm as a whole, demonstrate our loyalty to them in the hope of reward, and generally treat them as human counterparties in a relationship. Of course none of this is realistic or justified, but if you're running a company it's not something you can ignore. If you're a user/consumer/customer of course, it makes sense to step back and realise that your loyalty means nothing to a corporation, they are not a person but composed of people, that they have their own internal goals, and they are rewarded by shareholders for some behaviour we'd call sociopathic in a person.
shurcooL 13y ago
Spotify came up with a sneaky one. I recently signed up and it only asked for some basic info. By default, of course, all email notifications are turned on. When you try to turn them off and save changes - it won't let you save because one "mandatory" field is incomplete [1]. So you're forced to add more info if you want to turn off email notifications. It's not a big deal, but it falls in the same category. I like the company less now. [1] http://img20.imageshack.us/img20/4800/jfgt.png http://img20.imageshack.us/img20/4800/jfgt.png
- snogglethorpe 13y ago
  That smells like a bug to me... [I've encountered similar issues, e.g. where I had entered my home address on Amazon using a format which at some point started being considered "invalid" by their input-validation code. The old address remained in the system (and worked fine when ordering), but I couldn't change any other personal info without also re-entering that address, because the input-validation wouldn't accept the old one (it apparently still validated all the old data at that point, even stuff I hadn't changed). Unfortunately the new system was much more restrictive about what it allowed in addresses, so I didn't want to... >< ]
- Too 13y ago
  Spotify is known for its shady tricks. Try figuring out that the client consumes a very large portion of your upload bandwidth. Another one is when they enabled the "local files" feature via auto update a few years ago, this feature not only allowed you to play mp3 files via the client but also phoned home to mama with a list of all your local music. There was no way to opt out of this, the client just auto updated and started importing everything from windows default music directory. It seems as though they update their TOS every time i restart the client also, who would read that when you are in a rush to start your music. The way they remove songs from the library is also a bit disturbing, some songs become gray and some just silently disappear. The frequency of removed songs is also quite high, for a free service i don't mind but if i pay premium and tons of my favorite songs disapear for each day i'm not going to be happy.
  - maaaats 13y ago
dreamfactory 13y ago
Not to defend but for context most of this stuff isn't new and just looks like the direct marketing industry applying their well-honed scammy techniques. If you look at the old record and book clubs that used to advertise in magazines it's the same story.
JacobSingh 13y ago
Amazing post. I have a pitch for a startup: It's an NGO which regulates email-marketing. To receive a certification of fair practices you have to abide by certain rules. Users can see a badge indicating that you are a member or not. Eventually gmail and others will have to add a setting on whether to allow emails from non-members or not and until then, browser extensions will do the work. Like?
Too 13y ago
If you want all these patterns collected in one page, try booking a flight with Ryanair.
Aloisius 13y ago
I actually had to design one of these dialogs for LinkedIn for the new who viewed my profile when we flipped it to a tit-for-tat system (you show me your name and I'll show you mine). We spent weeks changing the language to be as clear as possible without being overly verbose. I admit that the first (unreleased) rev probably was a bit shady, but in the end we ended up with something that's primary goal was to inform. I'm super glad we went that way too. Being upfront and clear turned out to be the way to go. Sure we didn't get instant benefit like you'd get with an opt-out, but the conversion rates were very good even when we spelled out what we were doing.
- 0x0 13y ago
  What happens if you keep the setting off most of the time, and only switch it on for a few minutes to check out your profile visitors, then switch it back off? Would you still stay anonymous (unless others happen to check their visitor lists in those few minutes?)
  - Aloisius 13y ago
    It only starts showing you views since the time you switch from being invisible to prevent gaming the system that way. Also, changing your profile visibility setting only affects your visibility on future visits to people's profile pages, not past visits.
gfodor 13y ago
If you're making an empirical argument that these techniques provide more harm than good, you need evidence. If you're making an argument that they are just evil and if you do them you should have trouble sleeping at night, that's another argument altogether. I'm not sure which of these two arguments the article is trying to make, but it's very short on the empirical side.
- tantalor 13y ago
  It's an ethical and aesthetic argument about what makes a good design, brand, or business.
zipop 13y ago
Or you could be like Facebook and just ignore request to unsubscribe by hitting their unsubscribe button.

520 points by justinph 13y ago

This article is complaining about the steps apple took to prevent guid tracking but framing it as being done explicitly to trick the user.

casca 13y ago
I would suggest that the article makes a very good case for it being done to explicitly trick the user. Apple particularly gives a huge amount of consideration for making an intuitive and obvious UI. It's not a big leap to assert that in this case, they've made it as difficult as they can to opt out while still offering the choice.
- captionobvious 13y ago
  More than likely it was done to protect the users privacy while keeping the exact same user experience. The protections were made behind the scenes with additional options made available to the user, but disabled by default. The transitions from guid had the potential to break many apps so encouraging users to disable it would have likely caused many unintended side effects in addition to cluttering the ui and annoying users with unknown options.
  - andybak 13y ago
    I've read this three times now and I'm still not sure I get it...
    - hack_edu 13y ago
      When on the shakier side of a heated discussion of anything Apple, you can always fall back upon the nebulous "user experience" argument.
    - e3pi 13y ago
      >I've read this three times now and I'm still not sure I get it... For about ten years now, every time I use Paypal for an eBay payment, I'm interrupted to choose a $10.00 off opt-in for setting up credit, I have to click-thru this every time. By now, I've done this several hundreds of times. I'm just a fish trying to stay out of their double-trap dark pattern slippery slope trammel net.
      - kwijibob 13y ago
        I've been on google+ since the beginning (2nd half of 2011). For the whole 18-20 months whenever I have gone to google+ on the web it has first had an obstacle "Find your friends" page asking me to spam all my contacts about google+. It still does it even today. There is no opt-out or "stop asking me to do this" checkbox. Even though I am an active plus user with posts and comments, it still treats me like a first timer. I'm trying to get into google+ but there is no way I'm going to spam my friends. That it has been doing this to me hundreds of times for nearly two years is unbelievable.
        e3pi 13y ago
        Another one. HN subject titles often link to the New York Times. Not having a subscription and offended with their offensive dark screen blinding pop-up `dark pattern' `hook' --free, or otherwise-- I now only read the respective HN comments. NYT coverage is usually good, I miss it, but now BBC, Reuters, Guardian, rt, Der Spiegel, HN, are my primary news feeds.
    - mcguire 13y ago
      Near as I can tell, he's saying that the advertisement tracking toggle (located under General > About, down past the version numbers, MAC addresses, etc.), named "Limit Ad Tracking" and defaulting to "Off" is actually another brilliant example of Apple's premier, user-centric interface experience design. But I've never really figured out the "double-negative, Newspeak is good for you!" thing, so I'm not sure.
  - mhaymo 13y ago
    And how does this solution achieve that better than putting the option in the Privacy menu, labelled "Disable unique identification (this may break some apps)"?
rogerchucker 13y ago
The unintuitive layering and double negative wording clearly tells me that Apple tried to have it both ways.

casca 13y ago

To disable Ad Tracking under IOS, go to Settings > General > About > Advertising > Limit Ad Tracking to On This is a worthwhile read (with excellent examples) on the ubiquitous "Click here to not receive third-party messages" pattern.

ashishgandhi 13y ago
This fall onwards it'll be: Settings > Privacy > Advertising.
- tomp 13y ago
  Source?
  - yoshokatana 13y ago
    I can confirm this. The language is "limit ad tracking" instead of "disable," which worries me a bit.
    - sjwright 13y ago
      I think a better word would be "refuse", as it more accurately portrays the situation. It too is not perfect though, as your "refusal" can still be ignored.
      - krichman 13y ago
        Ugh, I hate these. Instead of disabling it at the OS level, where they should do it; they create a "let's give unethical companies another bit of information" option.
      - rmidthun 13y ago
        Actually, in this case "Limit" is perfectly accurate. The only result of checking this is that the application must call advertisingTrackingEnabled before using the identifier. If enabled is NO, then the developer can use the identifier for "frequency capping, conversion events, estimating the number of unique users, security and fraud detection, and debugging". Notice that compliance with these restrictions is almost impossible to determine. http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/AdSupport/Reference/ASIdentifierManager_Ref/ASIdentifierManager.html http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/AdSupp...

peter_l_downs 13y ago

Long, but worth reading — a great overview of shady techniques that many startups may feel are worth employing to bump their growth stats.

mooreds 13y ago
It was even more interesting to me as a set of 'canaries in a coal mine'. If you are working for a company and start to see many, or one, of these patterns, it should serve as awake up call. Move on or don't, but be aware of the corporate behavior.

nissimk 13y ago

This reminds me of the android ui for turning of WiFi when the screen is off. It used to be on one of the settings pages. Now you have to go to settings, WiFi, menu, advanced. There are numerous articles in the Google index of people having trouble finding this option. It makes a WiFi only tablet last for a very long time without recharging if you don't use it too much. Why would they want to hide that option?

lnanek2 13y ago
Kind of prefer it is hidden myself. As a developer with apps that sometimes upload and the like in the background, I don't want countless emails from users who have flipped that switch and can't get their scores to post or whatever.

purplelobster 13y ago

I wish there was a browser plugin or something that displays all the blackhat manipulation a site employs as you visit it, and give alternative options.

zallarak 13y ago

Very well written. When you turn against your customers' welfare, you're almost always going down a path of failure in the long run.

z-factor 13y ago
Banks seem to be doing ok.
- rocky1138 13y ago
  For now. It's only a matter of time before a startup or two breaks that industry down just like they have for many others.
  - Wingman4l7 13y ago
    Things like regulatory capture make it hard for small players to get started in entrenched industries. Some examples: telecommunications (getting leases on existing pipes to sell your services), meat processing (look at the regs that small producers like Polyface Farms have to comply with), car manufacturing (look at the opposition Tesla is facing trying to sell direct to the consumer) -- and yes, banking.
  - sudonim 13y ago
    I'm a happy customer of both Simple.com and USAA. Both are very customer focused banks. The industry is being broken down, just really really slowly.
    - studentrob 13y ago
      Just curious, what benefits do you get from simple.com that USAA does not provide? I looked at it in the beginning but it didn't seem to add anything, perhaps that's changed.
      - sudonim 13y ago
        That's a great question. I like the experience of simple. I get push notifications when I swipe my card. I enjoy the "Safe to spend" amount that takes into account my goals. Photo check deposit is great too. It's early days for them, but I like backing that horse. USAA is a great company. They give you ATM fee reimbursements which is a huge benefit over simple. I feel guilty getting them since they have to eat that cost. In dealing with them, they're always pleasant and friendly, but they have policies like photo check deposit is only available if you're ex-military. Hope that helps!

deleted 13y ago

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namenotrequired 13y ago

Great article. This reinforces the "Data informed, not data driven" mantra - you can optimise a feature on your site for a single metric but always take the human effects into account. It also shows the importance of talking to your users in person. An A/B test may prove that ticking a box by default will get so and so many more users opting in, but it can't show you the look on their face when they realize what you just did to them.

nathas 13y ago

All I'm going to say is that even though it's awful The Ladders have all those tricks, they're successful. Not saying the ends justify the means, but I wonder how their business would look otherwise.

rmc 13y ago
Well that's the kinda the point of Dark Patterns? Companies use them because they work. They are unethical, but they achieve success (in the short term at least, sometimes long tem). This is why there is law, to level to play in field so the ethical groups can be not disadvantaged.
- kvcrawford 13y ago
  Except, law is invariably perverted to provide an advantage to a select group.
  - rmc 13y ago
    Sure, bad law. I'm not saying law is perfect or flawless. There's a ton of bad law. We should fix the bad law. Unfortunately making law is tied up to politics and PR and minefield of stupidity that is.
mcguire 13y ago
Did you happen to read the section on Experts Exchange?

mariusz331 13y ago

It's funny. I'm on the phone trying to reach a student loan representative right now. I keep pressing 1 for English, 4 for a student loan representative, 1 again for the type of loan, then I'm back to pressing 4 for a loan representative. It's an infinite loop! I try hitting 0 for an operator but then I'm prompted to give a 4 digit extension for the party I want to reach.

toyg 13y ago
It could be that the pool of operators for your type of loan is empty (i.e. they're all offline or engaged), and the app is set to automatically let you try again with some other department. Just going with Occam here, but I've seen a couple of callcentre call-routing systems and the potential for misconfiguration is fairly high.
- andrewflnr 13y ago
  Hanlon, actually. Just for the sake of terminology: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor . It keeps me sane.
effbott 13y ago
Most automated phone systems will connect you to an operator if you press 0 repeatedly (as in 10 to 20 times in a row). There's almost always a way to get around automated phone systems.
- mattm 13y ago
  Or when you call don't press anything. The system may assume you have an old rotary phone that can't make the correct tones and automatically forward you to a person. You can also try http://gethuman.com/ http://gethuman.com/
Joeri 13y ago
Student loans by themselves are an example of a business anti-pattern in my opinion. Schools and governments should figure out funding models that do not charge the students huge sums of money because it's perfectly possible to organize an education system without that (as many countries demonstrate). It is immoral to drive students into debt. Or, if you want a more rational reasoning: nowadays higher education is essential to gain access to knowledge worker jobs which are becoming the foundation of the post-industrial economy. Nations should want the best quality of students in those jobs, not just those who can afford the entry ticket. Therefore it makes sense from an economic perspective to amortize the cost of entry (higher education) across the entire taxpayer base and leave education as a purely merit-driven system where the best students get the most economically significant jobs.

hugi 13y ago

How intentional.

Fuzzwah 13y ago

Enjoyed the article, but I had to read it using the Clearly extension because the native web page is extremely laggy for me. I'm on a Win8 machine running current Chrome. It seems like such a simple design but hot damn does it chug when I scroll.

petemc_ 13y ago
Works fine with safari on my 2008 macbook.
KnightHawk3 13y ago
Same on Windows 7 with Chrome (IGP with a Mobile 1st gen i3 processor however)
HNaTTY 13y ago
That's probably because it's a 15MB page including all the assets -- Somebody doesn't believe in jpegs. The page still downloaded for me in 2.5s though, so I have to give the guy some credit for having a beefy host.
- kingnight 13y ago
  I think it may have to do with the fixed 'border' the entire page has. It is interesting though how Chrome chokes and Safari glides, though with choppy repositioning of the fixed border on scroll completion.
rogerchucker 13y ago
Don't wanna start an off-topic conversation but in spite of being somewhat of a Google fanboy I'm actively using (and have set as default) Safari instead of Chrome on my 2010 macbook pro for any page or site that is "heavy". My usage of Chrome has now shrunk to scenarios that involve heavy dependence on omni-search.
JoshuaRedmond 13y ago
I'm glad I wasn't the only person who had that issue. Strangely it works perfectly on the mobile version of Chrome for Android, but it grinds to a halt on the tablet version. This is especially strange as I have a Padfone 2 (phone connects to a tablet dock) , so the hardware is the same, and Chrome just gets relaunched in tablet mode when it's docked. Maybe due to the size of images being served being varied on screen size.

khawkins 13y ago

One large claim made here is that while Dark Patterns may increase subscription rates, they hurt brand image. Are there any scientific studies measuring the magnitude of such damage? Perhaps the occasional irritation is worth 5 others "duped" into accepting more advertising.

6cxs2hd6 13y ago

I thought in the EU you're legally required to do opt-in. You're not permitted to do opt-out. How can the UK Post Office do opt-out? Is this some UK exemption from the EU law? Or is it the typical government exemption from its own law (like e.g. how politicians exempted themselves from the US CAN-SPAM law)?

eterm 13y ago
Third party must be opt-in, but first party can be opt-out, that's why they do the alternate "opt-out opt-in" thing. In fact a lot of companies I've come across do it this way, you see it on physical forms too.
Adirael 13y ago
Speaking of Europe, lately I've been using iOS on my native tongue and the translation is "Limitar seguimiento..." I don't know what's behind that ellipsis, but the direct translation of what I see would be "Limit tracking", without double negative.
kawsper 13y ago
Depends on the country, I think it is up to all member states to implement and manage the laws internally. My former employer did the following "trick" to boost the amount of newsletter subscriptions (and angry customers): In Denmark you are allowed to create a competition where you write "By participating in this competition you will be subscribed to our newsletter". And then they write in the legal text under the form that you agree to them (and their mother-company) contacting you on phone, email and SMS. And you also agree that two separate companies owned by the same company is allowed to contact you. You are also allowed to leave the following checkbox checked as default, making it opt-out: [x] Subscribe me to the newsletter.
CaptainZapp 13y ago
Why, it is opt-in. Just so confusing and misleading that a lot of people will opt-in by mistake. The directive does not say that you must find a literal opt-in button on a web site.

alexdimitrov 13y ago

in iOS7 Advertising is in Privacy. Maybe apple are taking notes.

mullingitover 13y ago
Stole the words right out of my keyboard. This is fixed, just not deployed widely yet.

kamakazizuru 13y ago

way too many images - whats the TLDR on this?

jlgaddis 13y ago
TL;DR: RTFA.

suyash 13y ago

So what is the final state of the switch be if you want your self NOT to be tracked or reduced the amount of tracking : OFF or ON ?

bostonvaulter2 13y ago
You want it to be ON

lifeformed 13y ago

Does this site really need to be over 15MB large?

Skalman 13y ago
Well, considering 97% percent of the page load is images (average size: 400 kB), and the page contains slides that explain and complement the article... yeah, I think it does!
- lifeformed 13y ago
  The page renders really laggy for me. Seems like it'd benefit from dynamically loading in the images, or at least user more compression on the images. Also, the images have been shrunken to fit the page. They should just be that smaller size to begin with; you could probably get the page down to 8MB with minimal loss.

csallen 13y ago

I'm going to nitpick a bit here, mostly because it's entertaining to play devil's advocate on a topic that's always met with such one-sided responses on HN (in this case: dark patterns). My question is: Why should a company make it easy for people to do exactly what it doesn't want them to do? Sure, outright trickery and lies are almost unarguably immoral. And the author definitely identifies many examples of that. But there are other instances where I just can't agree with classification of the UX as a dark pattern. Let's take The Ladders, for example. In order to cancel, you have to fill out a form with a few required fields. What a shady, underhanded, and downright spiteful trick! Or is it? Most cancellation forms online will take you through an intermediary confirmation step, anyway. What's so evil about requiring a small form to be filled out? The questions are directly relevant to the act of canceling, and if you truly don't give a shit, you can fill it in with gibberish. Even if you give honest answers, you could be done with this form in literally 5 seconds. It almost certainly took you longer to fire up your browser and navigate to their site, anyway. My point is: The company is not attempting to trick you or obfuscate the truth. They know that the presence of the form will likely lower their cancellation rates by a marginal amount, yes, but there's nothing immoral about lowering cancellation rates. And the form isn't nearly long enough to be considered difficult or unreasonable, so it's not like they're attempting to frustrate people into staying. In the end, it convinces some people to change their minds, but nobody gets hurt. Compare that to, say, The Ladder's decision to auto-renew monthly subscriptions while hiding that fact at the bottom of the page in small gray font. Or to email subscriptions with no unsubscribe link. Or to burying opt-out checkboxes within gigantic forms. In these cases, companies are outright tricking people.

Sealy 13y ago
To give an example: In line with Google's mission statement of "Don't be evil", I figure that it could extend to "Don't be annoying". > My question is: Why should a company make it easy for people to do exactly what it doesn't want them to do? Because its just plain annoying to users. Running a business and designing your application / system to trick people into behaving in a certain way is one thing, being transparent is another. I think users these days are becoming a lot more educated and wiser to these techniques, as a result their loyalty is beginning to side with companies that offer a more honest level of transparency.

na8ur 13y ago

Very nice article. ethics! this is the problem of our society. the next article should be about making people sensible. How to reward them for been responsible. The thing is people don't care about their live. Managers change jobs, people accept NSA... Might be intresting to compare Customer-Live-Time-Value und Business-Model-LiveTime-Value. What if they knew that the bomb will be nightmare? I would love to see numbers? How about calculating Update-Costs of the SW to "how about having a new business model". The aren't these "dark pattern" businesses VC driven?

aspensmonster 13y ago

>"Brand relationships are like human relationships." No. Brands, corporations, and other legal fictions are not human. They're tools explicitly designed to generate profit. This is their fundamental purpose, and as such, they can never bear any significant resemblance to human relationships. Aside from that, it's certainly an excellent write up. And I like the term too: Dark Patterns.

grey-area 13y ago
I found this statement confusing at first too, but perhaps the way to look at it is that most customers do treat their relationship with brands by analogy to human relationships, whether they should or not. We get mad at brands, vow we'll never use them again, break up with them, come back to them, expect them to behave coherently, criticise the behaviour of one representative as if it were the firm as a whole, demonstrate our loyalty to them in the hope of reward, and generally treat them as human counterparties in a relationship. Of course none of this is realistic or justified, but if you're running a company it's not something you can ignore. If you're a user/consumer/customer of course, it makes sense to step back and realise that your loyalty means nothing to a corporation, they are not a person but composed of people, that they have their own internal goals, and they are rewarded by shareholders for some behaviour we'd call sociopathic in a person.

shurcooL 13y ago

Spotify came up with a sneaky one. I recently signed up and it only asked for some basic info. By default, of course, all email notifications are turned on. When you try to turn them off and save changes - it won't let you save because one "mandatory" field is incomplete [1]. So you're forced to add more info if you want to turn off email notifications. It's not a big deal, but it falls in the same category. I like the company less now. [1] http://img20.imageshack.us/img20/4800/jfgt.png http://img20.imageshack.us/img20/4800/jfgt.png

snogglethorpe 13y ago
That smells like a bug to me... [I've encountered similar issues, e.g. where I had entered my home address on Amazon using a format which at some point started being considered "invalid" by their input-validation code. The old address remained in the system (and worked fine when ordering), but I couldn't change any other personal info without also re-entering that address, because the input-validation wouldn't accept the old one (it apparently still validated all the old data at that point, even stuff I hadn't changed). Unfortunately the new system was much more restrictive about what it allowed in addresses, so I didn't want to... >< ]
Too 13y ago
Spotify is known for its shady tricks. Try figuring out that the client consumes a very large portion of your upload bandwidth. Another one is when they enabled the "local files" feature via auto update a few years ago, this feature not only allowed you to play mp3 files via the client but also phoned home to mama with a list of all your local music. There was no way to opt out of this, the client just auto updated and started importing everything from windows default music directory. It seems as though they update their TOS every time i restart the client also, who would read that when you are in a rush to start your music. The way they remove songs from the library is also a bit disturbing, some songs become gray and some just silently disappear. The frequency of removed songs is also quite high, for a free service i don't mind but if i pay premium and tons of my favorite songs disapear for each day i'm not going to be happy.
- maaaats 13y ago

dreamfactory 13y ago

Not to defend but for context most of this stuff isn't new and just looks like the direct marketing industry applying their well-honed scammy techniques. If you look at the old record and book clubs that used to advertise in magazines it's the same story.

JacobSingh 13y ago

Amazing post. I have a pitch for a startup: It's an NGO which regulates email-marketing. To receive a certification of fair practices you have to abide by certain rules. Users can see a badge indicating that you are a member or not. Eventually gmail and others will have to add a setting on whether to allow emails from non-members or not and until then, browser extensions will do the work. Like?

Too 13y ago

If you want all these patterns collected in one page, try booking a flight with Ryanair.

Aloisius 13y ago

I actually had to design one of these dialogs for LinkedIn for the new who viewed my profile when we flipped it to a tit-for-tat system (you show me your name and I'll show you mine). We spent weeks changing the language to be as clear as possible without being overly verbose. I admit that the first (unreleased) rev probably was a bit shady, but in the end we ended up with something that's primary goal was to inform. I'm super glad we went that way too. Being upfront and clear turned out to be the way to go. Sure we didn't get instant benefit like you'd get with an opt-out, but the conversion rates were very good even when we spelled out what we were doing.

0x0 13y ago
What happens if you keep the setting off most of the time, and only switch it on for a few minutes to check out your profile visitors, then switch it back off? Would you still stay anonymous (unless others happen to check their visitor lists in those few minutes?)
- Aloisius 13y ago
  It only starts showing you views since the time you switch from being invisible to prevent gaming the system that way. Also, changing your profile visibility setting only affects your visibility on future visits to people's profile pages, not past visits.

gfodor 13y ago

If you're making an empirical argument that these techniques provide more harm than good, you need evidence. If you're making an argument that they are just evil and if you do them you should have trouble sleeping at night, that's another argument altogether. I'm not sure which of these two arguments the article is trying to make, but it's very short on the empirical side.

tantalor 13y ago
It's an ethical and aesthetic argument about what makes a good design, brand, or business.

zipop 13y ago

Or you could be like Facebook and just ignore request to unsubscribe by hitting their unsubscribe button.