INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
More scrutiny than ever is in place on the tech industry, and while high-profile cases like Mark Zuckerberg appearance in front of lawmakers
garner headlines, there are subtler forces at work
This study from a Norway watchdog group eloquently and painstakingly describes the ways that companies like Facebook and Google push their
users towards making choices that negatively affect their own privacy.
It was spurred, like many other new inquiries, by Europe GDPR, which
has caused no small amount of consternation among companies for whom collecting and leveraging user data is their main source of
income.
WTF is GDPR
The report (PDF) goes into detail on exactly how these companies create an illusion of control over your data while
simultaneously nudging you towards making choices that limit that control.
Although the companies and their products will be quick to point
out that they are in compliance with the requirements of the GDPR, there are still plenty of ways in which they can be
consumer-unfriendly.
In going through a set of privacy popups put out in May by Facebook, Google, and Microsoft, the researchers found that
the first two especially feature &dark patterns, techniques and features of interface design mean to manipulate users…used to nudge users
towards privacy intrusive options.&
Flowchart illustrating the Facebook privacy options process & the green boxes are the &easy& route.
It
not big obvious things — in fact, that the point of these &dark patterns&: that they are small and subtle yet effective ways of guiding
people towards the outcome preferred by the designers.
For instance, in Facebook and Google privacy settings process, the more private
options are simply disabled by default, and users not paying close attention will not know that there was a choice to begin with
You&re always opting out of things, not in
To enable these options is also a considerably longer process: 13 clicks or taps versus 4 in Facebook case.
That especially troubling when
the companies are also forcing this action to take place at a time of their choosing, not yours
And Facebook added a cherry on top, almost literally, with the fake red dots that appeared behind the privacy popup, suggesting users had
messages and notifications waiting for them even if that wasn&t the case.
When choosing the privacy-enhancing option, such as disabling face
recognition, users are presented with a tailored set of consequences: &we won&t be able to use this technology if a stranger uses your photo
to impersonate you,& for instance, to scare the user into enabling it
But nothing is said about what you will be opting into, such as how your likeness could be used in ad targeting or automatically matched to
photos taken by others.
Disabling ad targeting on Google, meanwhile, warns you that you will not be able to mute some ads going forward
People who don&t understand the mechanism of muting being referred to here will be scared of the possibility — what if an ad pops up at
work or during a show and I can&t mute it So they agree to share their data.
Before you make a choice, you have to hear Facebook case.
In
this way users are punished for choosing privacy over sharing, and are always presented only with a carefully curated set of pros and cons
intended to cue the user to decide in favor of sharing
&You&re in control,& the user is constantly told, though those controls are deliberately designed to undermine what control you do have and
exert.
Microsoft, while guilty of the biased phrasing, received much better marks in the report
Its privacy setup process put the less and more private options right next to each other, presenting them as equally valid choices rather
than some tedious configuration tool that might break something if you&re not careful
Subtle cues do push users towards sharing more data or enabling voice recognition, but users aren&t punished or deceived the way they are
elsewhere.
You may already have been aware of some of these tactics, as I was, but it makes for interesting reading nevertheless
We tend to discount these things when it just one screen here or there, but seeing them all together along with a calm explanation of why
they are the way they are makes it rather obvious that there something insidious at play here.
