this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2024

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FTC study finds 'dark patterns' used by a majority of subscription apps and websites | TechCrunch (techcrunch.com)

submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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The U.S. FTC, along with two other international consumer protection networks, announced on Thursday the results of a study into the use of "dark patterns" -- or manipulative design techniques -- that can put users' privacy at risk or push them to buy products or services or take other actions they otherwise wouldn't have. TechCrunch:

In an analysis of 642 websites and apps offering subscription services, the study found that the majority (nearly 76%) used at least one dark pattern and nearly 67% used more than one. Dark patterns refer to a range of design techniques that can subtly encourage users to take some sort of action or put their privacy at risk. They're particularly popular among subscription websites and apps and have been an area of focus for the FTC in previous years. For instance, the FTC sued dating app giant Match for fraudulent practices, which included making it difficult to cancel a subscription through its use of dark patterns.

[...] The new report published Thursday dives into the many types of dark patterns like sneaking, obstruction, nagging, forced action, social proof and others. Sneaking was among the most common dark patterns encountered in the study, referring to the inability to turn off the auto-renewal of subscriptions during the sign-up and purchase process. Eighty-one percent of sites and apps studied used this technique to ensure their subscriptions were renewed automatically. In 70% of cases, the subscription providers didn't provide information on how to cancel a subscription, and 67% failed to provide the date by which a consumer needed to cancel in order to not be charged again.

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[–] [email protected] 92 points 4 months ago (20 children)

So, a dark pattern is a design that tries to trick the user into something. But what is the word for "knowing what the user wants, blatantly ignoring it and imposing the companies will anyway"?

Example: I think YouTube shorts are a terrible format, and I find them generally irritating. So I click the X on the element in YouTube that has a bunch of side scrolling cards, where each card is one of these shorts. YouTube informs me it will hide them for 30 days and then they'll be back.

Another example, Windows Update. I've set all the group policy settings so it should never restart and update without me triggering it. But, if I allow it to download the update, then damn my group policy settings, it is going to apply that update and restart whenever it wants.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 4 months ago (1 children)

But what is the word for "knowing what the user wants, blatantly ignoring it and imposing the companies will anyway"?

Enshittification

[–] [email protected] 17 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

Enshittification will often involve doing things like this, yes. But as the link itself states, the actual meaning—per Doctorow's original definition—is an entire process, and a little more descriptive. These things are not the same, one is just frequently a symptom of the other.

Sorry if this comes across as pedantic, I'm in a personal quest, of sorts, to protect the original meaning because I think it's too important to lose. To anyone else reading this: please, don't use enshittification when you really only mean "the platform is doing something bad."

For the quoted behavior, I'm a big proponent of "asshole design."

[–] [email protected] -1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

You know that it's not a new concept, right? Just a new word for a specific type of rent seeking that has plagued capitalism forever.

It's nice to see people learning economics from YA fiction authors, but read some books man

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

You know that it’s not a new concept, right? Just a new word for a specific type of rent seeking that has plagued capitalism forever.

Any pre-existing name for this specific type of rent seeking you'd rather people used instead? For what it's worth, I believe enshittification has its own benefits.

It’s nice to see people learning economics from YA fiction authors, but read some books man

There are better ways to express yourself than this.

Being a YA fiction author does not diminish the worth of one's ideas or their other works. Cory also worked with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is absolutely a position that, coupled with his many years of studying the digital landscape, gives him a level of insight into it that makes people interested in what he has to say about it, and for good reason. It's not merely about economics.

If you think people could do the subject, themselves, or others better in this regard by consuming better material, you could point a better direction than "read some books"

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

I'm just annoyed that people think rent seeking is some newly discovered concept. I'm not sure if there's a name for the very specific type we're referring to and I'm not sure there needs to be.

I think we'd be much better off if people actually understand the underpinning concept rather than having a thin and shallow understanding of just one single way it manifests.

I'll let the opening paragraph of the "rent seeking" wiki page to show why:

Rent-seeking is the act of growing one's existing wealth by manipulating the social or political environment without creating new wealth. Rent-seeking activities have negative effects on the rest of society. They result in reduced economic efficiency through misallocation of resources, stifled competition, reduced wealth creation, lost government revenue, heightened income inequality, risk of growing corruption and cronyism, decreased public trust in institutions and potential national decline.

Successful capture of regulatory agencies (if any) to gain a coercive monopoly can result in advantages for rent-seekers in a market while imposing disadvantages on their uncorrupt competitors. This is one of many possible forms of rent-seeking behavior.

(Emphasis mine)

On the wiki itself, each one of those items in the list I bolded has an entire wiki page about it and I'm pretty certain what is called "enshittification" fits into at least one of them.

I just wish people would care about the actual thing that's going on and not just one aspect of one type of the thing.

Edit: for any downvoters, look at my response to the reply below for clarification. Yes I'm glad that a small group of terminally online nerds in the tech industry have finally discovered one aspect (and consequence) of rent seeking. That's not really my issue.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

If it is not indeed a new concept, it seems a great deal of people either didn't know about it, or refused to care. Rather than be annoyed at the rediscovery, perhaps a better outlook would be to rejoice that these same ideas are reaching more people through the new words than it did with the old?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

The problem is, they're not actually learning about anything real, they're learning about one specific outcome of rent seeking in the modern world that they only noticed because of their profession. By giving this very narrow and specific concept a cute name, and making that shit popular or whatever has literally prevented young people from understanding these important economic concepts on any real level.

So yeah I'm glad that a small portion of terminally online tech nerds have finally discovered a major form of rent seeking in their industry and identified it as a problem. But then they just stop there as if it exists in a vacuum. I just wish they'd read some actual books (or hell, if you don't want to turn off the screen, audio books?) about the subject rather than just repeat some clever term over and over.

That's my problem. I guess it's nitpicky. But I do believe there are people who will now never learn another single thing about economic concepts that affect their lives because they're not even aware that this "newly discovered phenomenon" is just one small aspect of a much larger problem that is endemic to all of capitalism. They just think it's this quirky thing that only affects tech.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago (1 children)

In other words, asshole design is only one part of the enshititification process.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Yeah, I think you could say that :^)

The most important things to remember about enshittification are the reasons why it happens in the first place and the particular manner in which it does, time and time again. To anyone interested in this topic, consider giving Doctorow's talk a watch. It's great, and explains all of this really well.

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