I was let go for refusing to deploy a dark pattern

https://www.peachesnstink.com/p/6pJoCuczOj8cxCUQDMlfQv

by codingclaws • 5 years ago

615 517 5 years ago

gccs• 5 years 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.

polynomial4• 5 years 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.

nitrogen2• 5 years 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• 5 years 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• 5 years 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.

danpalmer4• 5 years 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.

JohnBooty3• 5 years 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• 5 years ago

Then save it to local storage

tgv• 5 years 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• 5 years ago

That's why LocalStorage exists.

benjaminjosephw• 5 years 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.

alpaca128• 5 years ago

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.

Data entered in a form don't require an active connection. If submitting the form fails you can resubmit it.

Usually such issues start to appear when companies decide to implement their own custom UI from the ground up in a way that the result can only be described as undefined behaviour and things like input fields reset their state when you look at them the wrong way.

gumby• 5 years ago

Data entered in a form don't require an active connection.

Such an important property of the web. Server sends a description of what it wants, client renders and handles interactions. Things like server side rendering are anti-web.

Server-side rendering, streaming video, and such aren’t incompatible with internet philosophies in the slightest, just not aligned with the intent of the www. Apps, even the ones that aren’t merely web views, are more www-like in this regard.

sixothree• 5 years ago

I know of a situation where someone refused to do something maybe 1/4th as shady as this. It sounded semi-reasonable to me.

In this case, the boss simply assigned the task to someone else. Employee stayed employed.

etripe• 5 years 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?

3pt141592• 5 years 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.

eloff2• 5 years 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.

steveBK123• 5 years ago

Exactly. I've been a victim of a dark pattern like this years ago when I was trying to find mortgage rates.

Many of the online mortgage rate tools are really just lead generation sites, including some of the big name brand ones.

One wanted me to create an account, and I got about half way through (I stupidly gave my phone number) and then exited without creating account. I believe they had a sort of "enter email, next. enter phone, next" kind of page by page pattern.

Anyway, within an hour of exiting I was getting 3 phone calls per hour from mortgage companies soliciting me for business.

whalesalad• 5 years ago

The dark pattern is capturing an email address even if someone doesn’t submit the form. Imagine you start a guest checkout, type your email address and nothing more, then close the window. That email would still get captured for marketing purposes. Because this isn’t what a user would expect, it’s considered a dark pattern.

leephillips• 5 years ago

And the browser’s autofill may fill in the email address without the user intending to, conceivably.

deepsun• 5 years ago

Well, if email was saved secretly, as author wrote, it means users were not aware of that their personal info is saved. Also, since it's Javascript, it means that they weren't first-party, who had the email address anyway.

If they added a text for user like "Your email address is saved by XXX Inc, we will just send you 3 reminders", then it would be ok.

For example of the same dark pattern: if you look at any hotel booking page (not aggregator like booking.com, but hotel-owned), I bet you will see at least 5 third-party tracking scripts, they all store every action you make on the page without user explicit knowledge.

kube-system4• 5 years ago

5 is pretty low. There are many popular websites that share data with >100 third-parties.

dahart3• 5 years ago

If they added a text [...] then it would be ok.

I’d agree with that as long as the text is visible before entering the email address, and the text also mentions that email will be saved before completing the form.

I bet you will see at least 5 third-party tracking scripts

Analytics and tracking scripts is a good point. Sometimes it’s implemented in a way where tracking scripts don’t have access to keystrokes, for example by iframing them, and you’d hope that the web site owner would care enough about their own security to do that. But you’re right that unfortunately it’s common. In this case I think we need some legal protection in the US and elsewhere similar to GDPR that clarifies that collecting such information can only be done with explicit consent.

iovrthoughtthis• 5 years ago

would it be surprising to a user if they received an email from a company they hadn’t given their email to?

if yes, it’s a dark pattern.

if no, it’s not.

i side with, yes.

slver3• 5 years ago

It's not surprising because we're used to spam. /s

dev_tty01• 5 years ago

For me, this is only ok if at the top of the form there is big easy to read text that says any data typed in the form is saved immediately prior to the user hitting submit. Anything else is a dark pattern.

Let's not kid ourselves. We know most users naively think the data is just on their screen and nowhere else until they hit submit. If we write code to circumvent that expectation we know it is a deception. After all, the default behavior is that the form data is not available early. The programmer has to explicitly do something to counter the default.

danpalmer4• 5 years 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.

danpalmer4• 5 years 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• 5 years 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.

ehnto5• 5 years 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• 5 years 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.

potatosalad1• 5 years ago

Newsletter popup that asks for email address and if you click Cancel or X doesn't save it: annoying but not a dark pattern

Popup that asks for email address that doesn't have an 'x' (or the 'x' doesn't appear for a while) and the email address field secretly records what the user types and even though they clicked cancel their information was secretly shared: dark pattern

matheusmoreira9• 5 years ago

At what point does a newsletter pop-up become a dark pattern?

At what point does it not? Pop-ups exist to steal attention. It's abuse. Why do these marketers believe they are entitled to anyone's attention? They are not.

a business owner can have a very hard time grasping why

Of course. Businesses generally couldn't care less about how much they're abusing their workers or their consumers. The only thing they care about is their profit. Dark patterns are just value extraction mechanisms, it's their abusiveness that makes them dark.

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

Yes. It's an inherently abusive and sociopathic view. They don't consider us human beings.

kube-system4• 5 years 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.

dhimes2• 5 years 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• 5 years 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)

karaterobot• 5 years ago

There are laws that regulate data collection, it's just that companies who break them have every expectation that they'll never get caught at it.

For example, here's an HHS page that exists to brag about the effectiveness of HIPAA enforcement[1], and even by their statistics, about 0.3% of complaints result in reviews. Now imagine what percentage of violations never result in complaints.

GDPR is arguably more successful, insofar as they levied around $150M in fines last year, but most of that was from a couple big cases (Google chief among them) involving companies who are so big that even getting a $50M fine isn't going to change their underlying practices. It's the cost of doing business if hoarding private data is your business model.

Pretty much every website I've ever looked at that had a GDPR compliance notice was implementing it in violation of the actual regulation: they set cookies first and then notify you about them. That's not how it works, dude. If you consider that GDPR applies to any business that transacts with EU citizens, the number of non-compliant websites is so huge that $150M is nothing. The only effect of GDPR in practice has been to fill the world with meaningless banners, not to protect anybody's data.

And in a nutshell, that's how data collection and privacy regulation has worked out in the real world: a lot of meaningless compliance theater, while business goes on as usual.

[1]https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/compliance-enfor...

kube-system4• 5 years ago

GDPR is successful because they hand out fines but every website is in violation of it? I would think that a successful law results in compliance.

As someone who has worked with HIPAA data, I have personally seen the data treated with a great deal of thought around compliance. I think the numbers you cite are a result of that, not in spite of it. As your source points out, many of those complaints aren't eligible for enforcement. This isn't because HIPAA isn't enforced, it's because many of the people who are complaining don't know what HIPAA does.

But the US needs their own general privacy law too, GDPR is not enough, as it isn't applicable to a lot of software built in the US.

dt3ft• 5 years ago

Respect.

codingclaws2• 5 years ago

thanks

weeboid• 5 years ago

The bigger smell is no version control :D Saving emails `onBlur()` is probably not a dark pattern.

that_guy_iain6• 5 years 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• 5 years 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/

surround5• 5 years 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• 5 years 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.

raxxorrax2• 5 years 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.

belval2• 5 years 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.

matheusmoreira9• 5 years ago

And if you call them out on this obvious bullshit you get fired for creating a hostile work environment or some equally bullshit reason.

JohnDeHope• 5 years ago

"even when told it is one on HN" I think this is an appeal to authority, a logical fallacy. https://www.thoughtco.com/logical-fallacies-appeal-to-author...

Is there a reasonable list of "dark patterns" that this tactic in the OP falls into? I don't doubt it is a dark pattern. I'd just like to know which one it is, and have it explained to me in a little bit more detail. Thanks!

JasonFruit2• 5 years ago

I think the point of that part was, "Even the dark-pattern-addicted HN crowd recognizes that this is a dark pattern, so why doesn't everyone?"

ryantgtg• 5 years ago

I’m seeing a lot of people who didn’t understand what is being described. I’m a front-end dev (kind of) and didn’t understand the description in the blog post. Once it’s been explained on HN, most people here seem to agree.

theshadowknows• 5 years 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• 5 years ago

But what about making it easier to auto-fill member's information into a contract? (sarcasm)

perfunctory• 5 years 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.

3pt141592• 5 years 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.

prophesi2• 5 years 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• 5 years 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.

kilburn• 5 years ago

The fact that legislation exists has done me wonders fending against dark patterns.

Real example:

Client> We want the "I agree" button checked by default

Me> I'm not a lawyer, but I think this goes against the GDPR in that users must give their consent by action, not by inaction. I would advise to at least check with your lawyers first.

Client> Oh! I'm so tired of those laws, we'll get back to you after checking.

(a couple days later) Client> Yeah you were right, lawyers say we'd better leave it unchecked.

I know that client very well. I would have _never_ been able to convince them on a morality argument.

What's more, after a few interactions like the above now they don't bother going to the lawyers anymore. I just say "I'm not sure this is acceptable" and they immediately agree to whatever non-shady alternative I propose.

danuker• 5 years ago

If OP's client is in the EU, then what was asked is already illegal.

dylan6046• 5 years ago

Our best bet for dark patterns to disappear is via legislation

And what would the language you propose look like for this legislation that doesn't have loopholes, caveats, etc for people to get around once the lobbyists are done with it?

tut-urut-utut• 5 years ago

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.

Why holding only developers responsible for non-ethical features? What about the actual decision makers and legislation.

By the same logic, if only factory workers decided it's immoral to build weapons, there would be no wars. But those spineless creatures just want bread on the table and don't care about world peace.

The only way to avoid these dark patterns is a set of laws that punish them. The reason why we don't have such laws is that we as a society don't know and don't care. It's we all, not only "spineless developers".

squiggleblaz3• 5 years ago

By the same logic, if only factory workers decided it's immoral to build weapons, there would be no wars. But those spineless creatures just want bread on the table and don't care about world peace.

I think the question is, are developers engineers or just programmers? The responsibility of an engineer is to give pushback when it is deserved.

As you say, the responsibility is on decision makers. But they care about the politics. They will try to make it look like you're on your own. But if you clearly demonstrate the mood of the company's employees, they will reconsider their position. The result will be compromise not capitulation but it's better for something to be better even if it isn't great yet.

rytor7182• 5 years ago

I don't agree. Responsibility lies with the doer in this case -- the person who types the dark pattern into the code. If my manager tells me to slap my coworker, she's only barely to blame for demanding something dangerous and unethical. I'm the asshole if I do it.

There's plenty of blame to go around. But at current, we really do have to do better as a community and refuse these requests far more often than we currently do.

Silhouette• 5 years ago

Most probable reason is that business owners are assholes.

Some business owners are. Some of us do try to run our businesses in ethical ways, despite knowing very well that we could probably make a lot more money if we included a dark pattern or two. It would be nice if people could at least not insult us while we're doing it by lumping us in with the $$$ crowd and normalising the bad behaviours we want to resist.

shrimp_emoji• 5 years ago

spineless creatures not being able to stand up for their principles

Why assume they have principles?

NaturalPhallacy2• 5 years ago

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.

I feel like a lot of people saying this lately haven't tried to get a job since the pandemic.

Invitations to apply from recruiters whose job it is to get people in the door are not job offers, nor royal treatment.

YeezyMode• 5 years ago

When your industry isn't on this list, https://www.aarp.org/work/job-search/info-2020/coronavirus-o...

it's understandable why people feel that way.

dragonwriter2• 5 years ago

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.

Sure, that’s understandable.

But to be understand it, also remember that when highly paid experts that get royal treatment so long as they conform confront employers over ethical issues...you get the Google Ethical AI massacre.

“Royal treatment” isn’t unconditional, and means you have a lot to lose.

matheusmoreira9• 5 years ago

sorry for the harsh tone but I don't know how to say it any other way

You shouldn't have to apologize. Nothing wrong with being harsh. We should be harsh, especially with people who perpetuate these unacceptable practices. Indignation is a perfectly valid response when faced with this.

phatbyte• 5 years 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• 5 years ago

i mean, even without the dark patterns that's enough to justify quitting.

a2tech• 5 years 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• 5 years ago

Do they at least work on files locally? Or do they ssh in to modify the PHP file?

cactus2093• 5 years 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.

belval2• 5 years 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_iain6• 5 years 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.

josefresco4• 5 years 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

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• 5 years ago

Does Zoominfo get the browser to autofill a bunch of fields that are obscured from the user? Interesting...

josefresco4• 5 years 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• 5 years 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?

javajosh2• 5 years 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.

ridaj4• 5 years 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• 5 years 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.

anshorei• 5 years ago

But how will you show the kids ads then?

javajosh2• 5 years ago

Those discussions did happen, and I agreed that there was a niche possibility for a product targeted at parents of young children. Maybe. But they didn't want to talk about a niche product (it's Google, after all) and after thinking about it I didn't feel comfortable with the idea at any level - it trains kids and parents to be dependent on tech, trains kids it's okay to be constantly tracked, and while there are undeniable benefits, there are undeniable costs, too. The older the kid gets the more problematic it all becomes.

matsemann• 5 years ago

I once was contacted by a recruiter from the company owning most of the big newspapers in my country. They were putting together a team to be the first in the region to make news tailored for the reader. I turned them down, and actually told them it was on ethical grounds. With how bubbly and divided the news landscape has become the later years I feel that was a good call.

jacobsenscott2• 5 years ago

There are smart watches for kids, and as a parent I thought they were great (my kid is old enough for a phone now). They had a very limited set of features but my kid could call me or text me silly pictures anytime, and I could call him or text him back. And I could see his current location. They had terrible battery life though.

But I'm not one of those parents who things screens are inherently bad anyway. I think you would be hard pressed to find any credible evidence to the contrary. I grew up on screens and now I have a good job as a programmer where I can provide a good life for my kids.

jefftk2• 5 years ago

I don't know, I'm considering one for my kids. The oldest is seven, and it would be great if they could go to the nearby park by themself. Kids watches that function as cell phones would work very well for this.

deckard1• 5 years ago

I would object to that product on the basis that kids need fewer, not more screens.

The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can't. Not without your help. But you're not helping.

Why javajosh? Why aren't you helping?

Would it be too on-the-nose to point out that this hypothetical smartwatch would probably be running Android?

JohnBooty3• 5 years 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• 5 years 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.

JohnBooty3• 5 years 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.

parrellel• 5 years ago

Autocomplete would be my guess. Which makes it more obviously scummy.

akagusu4• 5 years 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• 5 years 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.

akagusu4• 5 years 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• 5 years ago

Anymore? It used to be worse.

akagusu4• 5 years ago

Do you think it was worse? Why?

that_guy_iain6• 5 years ago

What sort of ethics do you have that need to be comprised to work in tech?

akagusu4• 5 years ago

Tell me one tech company that does not use dark patterns? And I think the problem is not only tech, it's everywhere. People turned on the "money at all cost" mindset. They know their actions will do harm to someone but they simply don't care.

gameswithgo2• 5 years 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• 5 years ago

there's probably a lot more context, but this is a pretty common marketing feature

some examples:

https://github.com/carlsednaoui/ouibounce

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/

yjftsjthsd-h2• 5 years 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.

partiallypro• 5 years ago

Left out of this post is a form or CTA that follows me on scroll, it doesn't make me feel like it's easier to find the form, it makes me feel like I'm being hounded to give my information.

s_severus• 5 years ago

I work in e-commerce and this kind of thing is totally standard. You get salespeople trying to sell you this and much worse regularly.

I was once pitched the exact dark pattern as in the OP - covert email collection. I was gobsmacked. I wrote about it at the time thus:

Towards the end of the slide deck, Dom excitedly explained how if a user enters an email address in any form field anywhere on the website, then regardless of whether the form is submitted, that email address will be captured by IntegriMart and paired up with a browser fingerprint for that user. This, presumably, allows us to “continue to build a dialogue” with that user.

Full story for those interested: https://www.michaelbromley.co.uk/blog/the-covert-opt-in/

mytailorisrich4• 5 years ago

Not to play devil's advocate here, but as an employee if you refuse to do something your manager tells you to do that is both within your job description and not illegal then you are in the wrong in terms of your duties as an employee.

The feature you describe is annoying (I think it's fair to say that everyone hates these pop-ups) but rather innocuous and certainly not unlawful so there isn't any reasonable ground to refuse to do it if you're employed as a web dev.

That's the nature of employed work.

Sodman• 5 years ago

Conversely, if you work for a company that lists it's "values" as something like "Being customer-focused", it's easy to find ground upon which to push back on things that go against the company's supposed values.

Software engineering is largely think-work. Some of it is creatively coming up with ways to solve novel technical problems, but an often understated part is thinking about how your implementations will affect your users, and optimizing for solving your users problems.

arminiusreturns• 5 years ago

This comment only works with a very narrow definition of "duties of an employee".

jessaustin• 5 years ago

...something your manager tells you to do...

There's a principal-agent problem here. The owners of the company don't care about a random manager's feelings. The manager certainly does, however, so much of what any particular manager will require is more about making the manager feel better than about making profits. Other employees are correct to disagree with such misuse of resources.

elihu• 5 years ago

The concept of professional ethics exists as is well established in other fields such as medicine, engineering, legal work, and journalism. Why should software development be regarded to take place in an ethical void?

Granted, if you refuse to do something your boss tells you to do because it violates your concept of professional and personal ethics, they may decline to continue employing you. And you might not have a legal basis to challenge your termination if what they asked you to do is legal. But walking away from a job may be the best option in some situations.

gameswithgo2• 5 years ago

Oh I was ready to accept the consequences.

caseymarquis• 5 years ago

Something being legal has nothing to do with it being ethical. Many terrible things used to be entirely legal. Some still are. Having said that, this kind of thing puts your job on the line. Standing your ground on ethics will always come with a price.

mwill• 5 years 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• 5 years ago

I am trying to find the unethical part of this, care to enlighten us?

thehappypm• 5 years 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.

wutbrodo5• 5 years ago

I disagree with this comment, but it's a shame (albeit an unsurprising one) that it's flagged into oblivion instead of responded to. I think the question illuminates something interesting about the incompatibilities between our pre-social-media notions of privacy and our current public posting behavior.

I don't have my beliefs on the topic clearly articulated, but I'll give it a crack. There's the argument that public information is public, and that there's no issue in aggregating it or otherwise making it more accessible, as long as the access is through legitimate means. I'm sympathetic to this and understand why people believe it, but I think it contradicts other consensus moral intuitions about privacy rights. A salient example that other HNers may be familiar with is the doxxing of Scott Alexander; any intellectually honest person familiar with the internet can tell the difference between "you can find out who he is if you do some digging" and "real name published by the NYT", despite the pathetic attempts at dismissing the possibility that doxxing him was bad (amusingly, including by people who I am 100% sure would find the bikini example to be a horrible violation). Hell, I was a reader of Scott's for years before I first came across his real name. The entire social Internet is built on security through obscurity, because opsec is hard and many people aren't constantly vigilant.

There's even precedent for these intuitions outside of the social media context. It's uncontroversially okay for someone's face to show up in your photo taken in public; once you've taken it, nobody cares if you study the guy in the background. However, aggregate and operationalize this, and it changes not just in degree, but in character: It's practically a trope in thrillers for universal CC cameras + alphabet-agency elbow grease to stitch together comprehensive tracking of an individual, and the public is rightfully a little creeped out by the thought.

The main difference here is that technology, as always, is democratizing the ability to do this, pushing the threat model from the unrealistic "NSA spends huge resources to track you" to the prosaic "facial recognition can just track and store everyone's movements at low cost" (or "some under-the-radar shop is aggregating your bikini shots") and a million other mundane violations of our moral intuitions. To my mind, we're in the uncomfortable period before a new norm equilibrium is reached that matches the technological context. This has already happened locally: I'm sure this group knows people who have good opsec since the early 2010s, and "treat everything you post as if it's public" is at this point an age-worn piece of wisdom.

ehutch792• 5 years ago

You might actually want to get a psych eval if you can't figure out how that's unethical.

This is not sarcasm, or me trying to be mean.

hughrr2• 5 years ago

That sounds about right. I was interviewed for a fairly well known company on contract a number of years ago. I was told the product was top secret and it was going to be amazing etc etc.

So roll in on first day after signing up to fuck knows what and it was a ticket touting company. I listened to their pitch which lasted until lunch, went and got myself a sandwich, sat on a bench and thought “fuck it, this is wrong” and just went home.

When I told the agent he went crazy at me because I’d burned his commission. Gave them the finger too. In some places it’s bastards all the way down.

Next time someone pulled that on me, I cut the interview off and only worked for predefined work for a number of years. If something is off grid on your contract, no is the answer.

sbarre2• 5 years ago

For anyone wondering (I had to look it up):

ticket touting = ticket scalping.

gjsman-10003• 5 years ago

You know what? I know that scraping is currently legal, but then we end up with things like that company or Clearview AI. We need some laws, ASAP, prohibiting data for being scraped for specific reasons.

Also, I have some friends in insurance companies, and they say that the insurance companies right now are actively trying to learn how to scrape people's social media - secretly - so they can catch "dangerous" behavior or violations of their rules. My dad's client was telling how there was a guy who was running a happy hour secretly in his insured bar, and his company which scraped Facebook found posts from other people saying "great happy hour at this bar", he reported it to the insurance company, and they sent the bar the bill. That's freaky and should be illegal as a violation of privacy.

refulgentis2• 5 years ago

I don't think it's freaky at all, I do find it freaky that there's people who will choose fraud over code as soon as code was anywhere in the loop that caught the fraud.

stickfigure2• 5 years ago

running a happy hour secretly in his insured bar

Can you explain what this means and why it is a problem? --Confused

sopooneo• 5 years ago

I think I get the tech side of this and how creepy it is to be caught that way. But what is nefarious or needs to be secret about a "happy hour"? Isn't that just a promotional event for bars/restaurants where discount food/drink sales for some period?

Edit: Maybe I get it. It seems certain states have made it illegal to run "happy hours", presumably because people drink too much and behave badly. https://spoonuniversity.com/place/why-did-these-8-states-mak...

squiggleblaz3• 5 years ago

You know what? I know that scraping is currently legal, but then we end up with things like that company or Clearview AI. We need some laws, ASAP, prohibiting data for being scraped for specific reasons.

I don't think there's anything about scraping that makes this disgusting. It would be equally bad if individual people uploaded compromising photos of their exes.

The issue here is that people need control — not ownership — over their image and personal data/information. (The difference I intend to draw between control and ownership, is that the legal notion of control would be written in such a way that the fine print is irrelevant. Most online systems have some fine print somewhere giving the site owner certain rights over your content. Such fine print about a person's image needs to be rendered such a risk that if a business owner suggests including something like that to a lawyer, the lawyer starts quivering in their boots. "If I include such a clause, I will never get paid, because within half a nanosecond of it being visible you will be sued into kingdom come and your great grandchildren will still be paying off your debts."

avz• 5 years ago

I am concerned that the type of defense of privacy exemplified by your argument (that reporting the happy hour to the insurance company was a privacy violation and should be illegal) will backfire sooner or later.

Assuming that the guy was running a happy hour in a place where they are banned, your argument reinforces the view that privacy is only needed for those who break the law.

Explaining why privacy is important is hard enough as it is. Please don't make it harder.

Ueland• 5 years ago

[deleted, wrong post]

yebyen• 5 years ago

God forbid people are happy for an hour, we've got to raise their insurance premiums. You know in Indiana, it's actually not even legal to have any happy hour promotions wherein the drinks are cheaper but only during a certain window. If you want to make people happy with drink specials, you have to offer them the same drink special all day long. (And so that's how we do...)

Happy hour here is just when you can get a $2 cheeseburger, or $0.50 wings on special. I had never even considered something like a happy hour being reflected on your insurance premium.

effingwewt2• 5 years ago

Thank you for having the fortitude to put your money where your morals are. It's one thing to turn something down, it's another entirely to give up money already earned and the prospect of more to come.

So, Thank you, for truly leading by example.

jacquesm• 5 years ago

Props to you.

sloshnmosh• 5 years ago

Scraping for bikini pics?

Reminds me of this lawsuit against Facebook:

https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-six4three-bikini-app-la...

tenerifevisitor• 5 years 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• 5 years 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.

codingclaws2• 5 years ago

Thanks. Yes, it is my forum.

wing-_-nuts• 5 years 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• 5 years 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_Zon...

installing ublock Origin should help block most of those nasty analytics hoovers

btown2• 5 years 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-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.

mkr-hn• 5 years ago

The audacity they have to run ads promising to simplify taxes when they're responsible for that complexity is amazing.

orcasauce• 5 years ago

We must keep filing taxes complicated, for the sake of Capitalism! This reads like Huxley.

handrous2• 5 years ago

Letting JavaScript initiate requests or mutate data associated with forms was a huge mistake.

wizzwizz4• 5 years ago

Consider installing Local Sheriff: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/local-sheriff... It detects these abuses and lets you know.

chubot2• 5 years ago

I’ve been using taxact for 4 years, and have found it better than TurboTax. This year something seemed off — quality issues and I think they were pushing for more upgrades. More dark patterns maybe, or at least grey.

Did something happen? Did they change ownership? Any good alternatives to taxact?

Penguinx628• 5 years ago

I recommend CreditKarma Tax. Intuit purchased them to destroy them but was forced to sell that division to square. if that's any indicator of how much of a threat they are to intuits revenue stream.

eropple2• 5 years ago

Tax preparation is one of those places I've found that going to a person rather than a website actually really pays off. TurboTax et al handle simple cases fine but if you have a complex situation (I own a home, owned a business, etc etc) having a person who's in the room with you and can directly ask you questions and interpret data that you've got on hand is invaluable.

My tax preparer is something like $250 a year and reduced my liability in a very tumultuous year from about $20K to about $9K by understanding what I actually had going on and helping to work through it.

knodi1232• 5 years ago

Me too. I have the exact same tax situation as last year, but now it pushed me really hard to upgrade, and at the very last step, it told me that something I entered on page 1 meant that they required me to go up by 1 pricing tier. They VERY CLEARLY made this product so that it wouldn't tell me that I needed to upgrade until I got to the very last step, so that I would feel intimidated at the idea of starting over with someone cheaper. So I switched to TurboTax, went through the same thing, and wound up paying $10 more as an F-You to TaxAct. Although turbotax did the same thing to me, so my moral high ground is pretty imaginary.

suzzer993• 5 years ago

Sounds like it was not only shady, but incompetent in making the calls synchronous.

freedomben2• 5 years ago

This happened to me with GMail recently. I fat fingered and accidentally opened dev tools and saw every single keystroke triggered a request back to home. I obviously knew this was happening, but seeing it happen in real time really, really unnerved me.

isleyaardvark• 5 years ago

Gmail autosaves emails as drafts while you’re typing, so at least in that case there’s an excuse.

TX0098812• 5 years ago

+ karma

tlogan2• 5 years 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• 5 years 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'

surround5• 5 years 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• 5 years 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.

Abimelex• 5 years 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• 5 years 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?

polynomial4• 5 years 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.

jart• 5 years 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.

surround5• 5 years 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• 5 years 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.

nscalf• 5 years 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.

rytor7182• 5 years 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?

whynaut2• 5 years ago

It sounds like they mean relative to the stuff they were working on. Very colloquial.

surround5• 5 years 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.

surround5• 5 years 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• 5 years 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.

jefftk2• 5 years 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.

yoursunny• 5 years 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• 5 years ago

You just described Tools like HotJar.

rsweeney212• 5 years 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.

amelius3• 5 years ago

Why not fix it for everyone with an IP address that's not in your boss's area?

cvak• 5 years 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.

AlexCoventry3• 5 years 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?

IngvarLynn• 5 years ago

we knew it wouldn't change anything. We'd just be replaced by someone that would.

Ye goode olde self-fulfilling prophecy.

fridif• 5 years ago

I think history has proven that there will always be someone willing to do what hundreds of millions of people wont

newsclues• 5 years ago

If I need a job, if the money is right my ethics are negotiable.

This is the norm.

suzzer993• 5 years ago

There needs to be a law that any subscription that can be signed up for online should be cancelable online. I'm not in favor of just implementing new laws willy nilly. But it's clear that companies are never going to do this on their own.

neolog• 5 years ago

California has that law

universa1• 5 years ago

I think Germany recently voted for this as well, so we will have this soonish :-) so if you can sign up online, there needs to be a similar way for cancelling.

matheusmoreira9• 5 years ago

We should be able to just tell the credit card company to cancel recurring payments. They'll try to charge the card and get denied.

HDMI_Cable• 5 years ago

I think California has something like that.

Clubber• 5 years ago

I was once a subscriber to the NYT, and will never be again because of this. I wonder if they are actually making money with this tactic or losing.

t0mas884• 5 years ago

Europe has that law. Not all countries have fully implemented it yet but there is a deadline for all to have it.

rsweeney212• 5 years ago

So the rest of the story is that Ohio was the first state to pass a law requiring users be able to cancel subscriptions on-line. So we had to add it back in, but only for users in Ohio and it was burried on the site and had like 7 pages of "account saving" stuff.

Eventually most states passed similar laws and so we opened it up to all US accounts. I'm not sure what the experience is like today.

amelius3• 5 years ago

If I was a lawyer, I would start a service for cancelling subscriptions.

I.e., user can cancel subscription on website, system automatically writes cancellation letter, letter is sent to corresponding company address. If cancellation fails, then an official complaint is served to the company, and from there it follows the usual court process.

josefresco4• 5 years ago

So we complied, but we all lost a little bit of our faith in Xbox that day.

You mean shady subscription business models right? Because Microsoft is certainly not alone.

Just the other day I had to CALL (as the only option) Network Solutions to cancel a security product.

serf• 5 years ago

You mean shady subscription business models right? Because Microsoft is certainly not alone.

so what that Microsoft isn't alone, their (poster) experience allows them to know unequivocally that Microsoft and the employees that work there make decisions that don't align with their personal ethics -- so they take out their anger on Microsoft.

the statement '...but we all lost a little bit of faith in shady subscription business models ' makes no sense -- the shady ones don't self identify, and it's not the methodology that is generally despised, it's the entities that that employ such methodologies against the public.

macd2• 5 years ago

It's so short-sighted too.

I signed up for America's Test Kitchen one time, because they had a nice program for learning the basics. Probably used it for a couple months, and then I was done with that content and wanted to cancel. Of course, even though you can sign up online, you have to cancel on the phone. On hold for 20-30 minutes during work hours, then talk to the rep, then listen to their retention offer, then it's successfully cancelled.

I actually loved the content, and would probably have resubscribed for a month here and there. (Cook's Illustrated is part of the same group and their content is also great.) But I will never do it again because of this experience.

How many people decided to get the new Playstation next time because of a frustrating experience cancelling their xbox subscription? You won't see those numbers in a spreadsheet.

boring_twenties• 5 years ago

Of course, even though you can sign up online, you have to cancel on the phone. On hold for 20-30 minutes during work hours, then talk to the rep, then listen to their retention offer, then it's successfully cancelled.

I haven't been in this situation, but I always imagined that there is a simple way out: send them a certified letter instructing them to cancel your subscription. If they continue charging after that, it's chargeback time.

Any opinions on whether or not this would work?

avitous• 5 years ago

This is one reason I won't purchase a subscription any longer unless they accept Paypal, which makes it ridiculously easy to terminate recurring payments to them (easier than calling my credit card company to dispute a charge). Having such a kill switch was how I was able to cancel my NYTimes subscription (another org notorious for making it impossible to cancel) without going through the same kind of hassle of dealing with a sales rep trying to keep my account.

zipiridu• 5 years ago

I have a similar story for internet. I tried to cancel my Xfinity (Comcast) internet service through the online chat. After being transferred several times, the person said they will do it but then disconnected right after they said that. I had to restart the process and in the end they told me I had to call. So I called and finally was able to cancel after they wasted hours of my time.

I will never use Xfinity/Comcast again in my life if I have a choice and will try to make sure everyone knows how shitty they are. Unfortunately they have monopolies in many areas and can be as shitty as they want, but if you have a choice I recommend never using them.

I can't believe that in 2021 these tactics are still legal. It's also stupidly shortsighted because in the long term I'm pretty sure they lose money by making everyone hate them. If it was easy to cancel, I would happily sign up again in the future without giving it much thought and would think positively of the company.

Edit: I also want to add that I was paying extra to not have a contract so I could easily cancel.

handmodel• 5 years ago

While I suspect in most cases (at least for smaller brands) making it hard to cancel pays off I 100% agree there is a measurement problem.

If you are optimizing for money made in the next month - or even next two years - then by definition making it hard to cancel will bring in more money. But it does hurt the brand long term (which is harder to measure)

tshaddox4• 5 years ago

What I fear is that hostile behavior like this is actually not short-sighted. I suspect in many cases these companies are pretty savvy about how their business models work, and I suspect that they are correctly estimating that they will end up ahead both in the short term and the long term by making recurring payments easy to forget and difficult to cancel. I really don't see this sort of customer ill will being that effective at scale. I will probably never pay America's Test Kitchen one penny after hearing your review, but my impression is that they still have an excellent reputation. And do you really have great alternatives? Does Playstation not use the exact sort of hostile patterns as Xbox?

t0mas884• 5 years ago

I know the majority opinion in the US is "less rules is good", but as a counter point: European consumer protection laws prohibit this, if you can sign up online it's mandatory to offer online cancellation without extra hurdles. Sometimes having some rules is a good thing...

8ytecoder2• 5 years ago

Not just short-sighted, these sort of things is why I don't try anything that involves a subscription. That is also why I make them pay the Apple Tax and subscibe through Apple instead.

erdo3• 5 years ago

I once got a marketing email from British Airways with no "unsubscribe" link, I emailed back telling them to take me off their list as I never asked for marketing emails when I booked my ticket.

The crazy thing is they replied, but refused to take me off the list unless I sent them an actual physical letter in the post. A few emails in they claimed it was due to a "technical" issue. That BS annoyed me so much, I am now into the 3rd decade of my own personal British Airways boycott

Edit: I realise that's insane but it makes me giggle everytime I deliberately don't book BA, and I wonder to myself how much money I would be willing to loose by going for the next most expensive ticket, just to keep my boycott going

marcinzm3• 5 years ago

It's so short-sighted too.

No it's not. The VP is maximizing their bonus and career growth within the company. That is likely tied to relatively short term metrics and especially to not having drops in metrics.

musicale2• 5 years ago

It's so short-sighted too.
How many people decided to get the new Playstation next time because of a frustrating experience cancelling their xbox subscription

If you make it hard to unsubscribe when people are short on time/money/interest, they will probably be less likely to resubscribe when they have the time/money/interest.

Long-term customers on something like Xbox Live have a larger incentive to resubscribe to recover access to their game library.

On the other hand, random web site X is probably just looking to churn through subscribers.

It's something of a tragedy of the commons; the incredible difficulty of unsubscribing from (everything that's a monthly bill) makes people wary of subscribing to anything.

lobocinza• 5 years ago

It is only true if you measure it. ;)

Companies rely too much on analytics.

syshum• 5 years ago

In 2008 or so I had a bad experience canceling Sirius Radio before they were Sirius/XM and before it was offered by Car Manufacturers, now I refuse to subscribe on any car I own simply because of that experience.

pfranz• 5 years ago

Similar story. I contributed to This American Life monthly for awhile. I had set it up online. I wanted to switch credit cards and could find no way to do it (they had redesigned their website). I couldn't even find a number to call. Sent some random emails with no response. I think I ended up changing my old credit card number and I'm now very, very skeptical about reoccurring payments.

On the other hand, it's quite well-known how easy it is to stop/start a Netflix subscription.

danielscrubs• 5 years ago

It is not short-sighted and I think it's a disservice to spread that theory because then people can just shrug and say: "a more profitable & moral company will outcompete them". If you instead believe that locking people in is profitable, the next step would be to make laws against it (if you signed up one way you need to be able to cancel via the same method; phone, internet, fax).

viro2• 5 years ago

dark patterns that require you to call the company should be illegal... like criminally illegal. Edit: how is this a controversial take

api• 5 years ago

Anything that makes me call to cancel never ever gets my business again.

viro2• 5 years ago

If you can sign up without a call you should be able to cancel without a call. Its the #1 reason Im pro-apple enforcing its IAP stuff.

svnpenn• 5 years ago

We'd just be replaced by someone that would.

IE, you're part of the problem. You're just rationalizing to make yourself feel better.

tpoacher2• 5 years ago

Only in the same sense that if you dodge a bullet, you're responsible for whatever person got killed instead of you.

ElViajero2• 5 years ago

IE, you're part of the problem. You're just rationalizing to make yourself feel better.

That's not true. Governments exist to deal with this kind of situation. If companies make it difficult for citizens to cancel subscription, it is time to regulate subscriptions.

Why is the responsibility of some developers to lose their jobs to stop a company doing something that is completely legal. If they have done that, they will have my gratitude and admiration. But, the developers are not "part of the problem". Microsoft is the problem, and the lack of regulation the other part.

o8r3oFTZPE• 5 years ago

Thank you for sharing this Microsoft story. One way to interpret it is that the only people who would hire you and your colleagues and compensate you the most were [insert unpleasant description]. I say that sincerely as someone who many years ago worked in the software industry then left to work in other industries. I was not a developer but was someone who worked with management on a daily basis. I saw a marked difference in character between people working in management in the software industry versus the others. It is worth considering why you could not all quit en masse. Who else would hire you? What would they pay you? To be fair, as far as "dark patterns" go, specifically, making cancelling subscriptions difficult, I think that existed long before software companies. However, it is food for thought to consider what kind of industry is employing and compensating you the most for your "work", and what other industries are not. None of this implies any "blame" targeted at anyone, it just highlights what monetary value society places on programming and the cast of characters who set that value. I worked alongside programmers in other industries besides software and we never asked them to anything unethical. Some of them arguably could have tried to work at Microsoft. They had freedom of choice.

nonameiguess• 5 years ago

This really has nothing to do with software as a product sector. XBox subscriptions aren't even subscriptions to software, right? It's subscriptions to game content, which is no different from subscribing to any other form of media.

The one I'm still hooked on, that this reminds me I've now given something like $3,000 dollars to over 3 years because I've been too lazy to make a phone call and wait on hold, is the YMCA.

Even religious nonprofits are engaging in dark patterns.

morelisp• 5 years ago

We'd just be replaced by someone that would.

Unionize.

bsd44• 5 years ago

"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."

That's a very bad argument. If you guide yourself by that logic then you can't really blame anyone for doing anything, because everything is justified.

CardenB• 5 years ago

He isn’t applying the logic to everything, he is applying it to one thing.

It’s possible for the argument to be true in this context and false in another context.

mdgrech23• 5 years ago

so I take it you don't have a mortgage or a family to support?

hangonhn• 5 years ago

Someone should make a website that rates services by ease of unsubscribing and include a link to the unsubscribe link if one exists.

A few publications that I enjoy is on my "Never subscribe" list because of the difficulty of unsubscribing. On the other hand, unsubscribing from HBO Max (at least via Apple TV) was so easy that I don't hesitate to unsubscribe and resubscribe and have done so a couple of times.

musicale2• 5 years ago

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.

Unfortunately that's the allure of dark and customer-hostile patterns - they extract a lot of money from people, at least in the short term.

If you're Microsoft/Xbox, though, you might want to think a bit about long term.

ping_pong• 5 years ago

Over a decade ago, I worked at well-known web site in one of the smaller properties. The site looked like it was from the mid-90s. A year-long effort was made to upgrade the site to something more modern, and it was beautiful.

It went live, and almost immediately the number of ad clicks dropped significantly. It turned out that the older site was so hard to use that customers would inadvertently click on ads, bringing up the revenue. The new site was so much easier to use that customers clicked on less ads.

The changes were almost immediately rolled back.

I think eventually the new site was put back in, but only after they ensured that ad clicks wouldn't go down precipitiously, but I had after by then.

a_f• 5 years ago

but we knew it wouldn't change anything

Maybe the immediate threat of developers quiting wouldn't have, but I think something might have eventually. Probably change from the top. My recent experience with the xbox gamepass app on Windows let me cancel my subscription fairly easily on both the console and the pc (two different accounts) without ever having to call someone. I like to think the culture at xbox has changed, maybe not microsoft, but maybe it will trickel up eventually.

ummonk• 5 years ago

And this is why I find the apple walled garden to be pro-consumer. I’m happy to pay the Apple tax in exchange for being able to cancel subscriptions easily.

ElViajero2• 5 years ago

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.

I sympathize with you. If you have quit, you would have my admiration and gratitude. But, what you did is reasonable. Microsoft was not doing anything illegal.

This is the reason why regulations exists. If companies are abusing consumers by making it difficult to cancel a service, developers cannot be the responsible to bring justice. Governments have that responsibility.

I ran the diff. 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.

e.g. The article situation is solved by the GDPR. This would completely break the GDPR as it requires informed consent before saving personal information like an e-mail.

If your government is not solved this issues, it is time to get a better one. I wish people, including in this threat, stop blaming employees for the fault of the bad action corporations. Corporation morality is a good example when the total is less than the sum of its parts.

wly_cdgr5• 5 years ago

A few years ago, I had an NYT subscription. I had to cancel it for some reason, and the cancellation flow was some of the worst UX I've ever experienced. You had to actually live DM with some poor sod who was being paid to try to get you to change your mind like half a dozen times. It was worse than old GoDaddy upsells...worse than cancelling Photoshop (which, by the way, fyi, Adobe will drop price at least twice if you keep trying to cancel, cable-company-style)

I would have resubscribed shortly thereafter if the cancellation flow had been good, or even just average. But because of how bad it was, I have never resubscribed, and most likely never will. Their cancellation UX cost them 5+ years of subscription revenue from me. Not only that but I go around telling people about how bad it was

wly_cdgr5• 5 years ago

Also, imagine being that VP's bf/gf and trying to break up with them

wly_cdgr5• 5 years ago

This is one of those things that needs to be straightforwardly and strictly regulated. Mandatory one-click unsubscribe

mro_name• 5 years ago

That's treating humans like thermodynamical particles: if one way is easier than the other, things will end up on the easy side eventually.

That is human dignity from the sales point of view: that of a particle.

strogonoff• 5 years 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• 5 years 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• 5 years ago

Can confirm that Salesforce integrated chats do this

AlexCoventry3• 5 years ago

I wonder whether enterprise slack does.

hipjiveguy• 5 years ago

really? how do you know? and which "chats" ?

vosper• 5 years 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)

bengale• 5 years ago

https://www.rrweb.io/ Is a cool open source alternative. We use it with sentry to see what causes our exceptions.

Also with a lot of these tools you can configure them to redact user input so you don’t capture too much.

matheusmoreira9• 5 years ago

How do I block this?

devenvdev• 5 years ago

We use fullstory which does the same, it's great not only for debugging, our company is Fintech and fraud and compliance departments can't live without it.

bcx• 5 years ago

Keep posting about this stuff. I can tell you this is a feature our customers often ask for, but we (https://Olark.com) refuse to implement, we do lose business over this.

I'd like to believe the karma for not letting any of our customers be creepy (and/or violate their customers' privacy), pays for the lost business many times over.

contravariant• 5 years ago

You guys really ought to advertise those kinds of things more. The only reason you're losing business over it is that your customer's customers aren't aware.

The least you could do is post a blog post about the dark patterns you refuse to unleash on your customer's customers and why.

taude• 5 years ago

There's companies out there who's marketing automation platforms do this by default when you use their embedded widgets.....

treis• 5 years ago

This one, IMHO, isn't that creepy. Or at least there is a legitimate purpose. It gives the agent information a few seconds quicker and those few seconds add up to real money over time.

nnf• 5 years ago

My company recommends Olark to our customers, and I wasn’t even aware of this, but knowing it makes me more comfortable. Thank you for not implementing this creepy feature.

andi999• 5 years ago

But what is the point. Why do you want to know e. g. if the customer is so angry that they want to haunt you in your dreams like Freddy Krueger.

shadowoflight• 5 years ago

I know this is probably just a me problem, but man, that makes me feel kinda bad for all the times I've angrily typed out an insult-laden chat message into customer support chats for cathartic reasons before deleting it and sending something nicer.

Not entirely bad, because recording what I type without my hitting send is shady asf on the company's part, but it makes me feel bad for the human on the other end of the chat.

Anyways, thanks for sharing, I'll have to keep this in mind in the future and maybe do less angry-typing-and-then-backspacing.

suzzer993• 5 years ago

We had a sales guy pitch exactly this when I worked at a big media corp. The big boss on the marketing side just happened to be in the room at the time, and told everyone that no one was ever to work with this company. I was impressed.

shpx• 5 years ago

This is how chat apps should work or have the option of working. Why make you look at an animated “…” until I’m satisfied with my message when you could be watching me write it instead? It’s closer to how conversation works and we have the bandwidth and the latency.

It’s immoral because you’re lying by hiding that this is happening and not making it go both ways, so why not show users and just make it part of the UI?

formerly_proven• 5 years ago

You're reading other peoples unfinished thoughts before they've said them?!

zajio1am• 5 years ago

Agreed. I like the behavior of traditional unix talk, which worked like that.

progval• 5 years ago

Google Wave did this (and with nest threads)! I never tried it for serious conversations, but it was quite fun to write at the same time as 1-3 other people and see them amend their messages in real time.

matheusmoreira9• 5 years ago

That's extremely obnoxious. I wonder if I can make uBlock Origin block this.

icefo• 5 years ago

Something similar applies when you're on the phone. When you're on hold, the agent can hear everything you say most of the time

grioghar• 5 years ago

100% emergency services can hear (and record) every word you say while while you’re talking to 911.

Am aware of several folks going to prison from confessions when they thought they weren’t being heard.

stevebmark• 5 years ago

Many forms autosave, I don't see this as a clear example of a dark pattern.

mbostleman• 5 years 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• 5 years ago

People don't want to risk get sued for nothing

atum47• 5 years 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• 5 years 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• 5 years 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.

yumraj2• 5 years 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• 5 years 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• 5 years 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• 5 years ago

Hire me. I’ll implement it.

nice2meetu• 5 years 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).

titzer• 5 years 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.

dm3192• 5 years 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.

freedomben2• 5 years 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.

ticviking3• 5 years 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.

MiddleEndian2• 5 years 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• 5 years 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.

dm3192• 5 years ago

The situation in the US is insane.

sli• 5 years 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• 5 years 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• 5 years 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• 5 years 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• 5 years 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• 5 years 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• 5 years ago

Lobby for something like GDPR. Half the stuff in this thread is illegal in the EU.

Supermancho• 5 years 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• 5 years 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• 5 years ago

If it's been implemented, show the URL and where the code is.

kazinator• 5 years 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.

I was let go for refusing to deploy a dark pattern

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