The Business Casual Backpacker

I thought I saw it, but wasn’t quite sure. A sliver appeared to be moving and maybe a touch too shiny. I stopped by someone’s gate for a while. A truck pulled up, lights blazing, and a repair man got out and there asked if I resided. I said no and inside remaining while he was. It’s no good watching a maybe-eclipse with too much electric company.

I was along the way down, looking over the poster city out, when something dark caught my eye and also to the right up. And it was there, the clouded outline, undoubtedly. I ended next to a garage area this time around. Just then, a man strode in the hill purposefully. He had ginger hair and wore a suit and an overcoat and white earbuds. He drawn one out and asked, midstride, “Is that the lunar eclipse?” Nod. He put the earbud back in and never halted moving, like he’d been performing a routine business transaction. Maybe he just wished to say he’d seen it? Or seen someone who’d seen it.

  • Political involvement: Confront, don’t cooperate
  • No two questions across slot machine games must have been similar
  • Invest in Quality Equipment
  • Design of an information system framework or structures for the business
  • It’s a cheap way to give a narrower group of options to mobile customers
  • It requires the devotion of the necessary time and effort

If people don’t brain companies spying in it, why not simply tell them plainly it’s occurring? They could just ask up front for all your passwords. The deception allowed by dark pattern design not only erodes privacy but gets the chilling effect of putting users under pervasive, clandestine security, it risks allowing damaging discrimination at level also. Due to these scandals, Facebook has started supplying a degree of disclosure around who’s spending money on and running a few of the advertisements on its platform. But plenty of aspects of its platform and procedures remain shrouded.

Even those components that are being opened up a bit remain obscured from view of the majority of users – thanks to the company’s continuing use of dark patterns to control people into acceptance without real understanding. Laws around privacy are also being tightened. And changes to EU data protection rules are a key reason dark pattern design has bubbled online backup into online conversations lately. The practice is under much larger legal threat now as GDPR tightens the rules around consent. Fair and ethical design is design that will require people to opt in affirmatively to any actions that benefit the commercial service at the expense of the user’s interests.

Yet frequently it’s the other way around: Web users have to go through sweating toil and work to try to safeguard their information or you shouldn’t be stung for something they don’t want. It might seem the types of personal data that Facebook harvests are trivial – and so wonder what’s the big deal if the business is using deceptive design to acquire people’s consent?

But the purposes to which people’s information can be placed are not at all trivial – as the Cambridge Analytica scandal illustrates. Among Facebook’s recent data grabs in Europe also underlines how it’s using dark patterns on its system to attempt to normalize progressively privacy hostile technologies. Earlier this year it began requesting Europeans for consent to digesting their selfies for facial recognition purposes – a highly questionable technology that regulatory involvement in your community had previously blocked. Yet now, as a consequence of Facebook’s confidence in crafting manipulative consent moves, it’s essentially determined ways to circumvent EU residents’ fundamental privileges – by socially engineering Europeans to override their own best interests.

Nor is this type of manipulation specifically meted out to certain, more tightly regulated geographies; Facebook is treating all its users such as this. In truth the consent stream is manipulative, and Facebook will not even offer a complete opt out of targeted advertising on its system. The ‘choice’ it offers users is to agree to its targeted advertising or to delete their account and leave the service entirely.

Which isn’t really a choice when balanced against the power of Facebook’s system and the network effect it exploits to keep people using its service. ‘Forced consent‘ is an early target for privacy campaign groups making use of GDPR opening the door, in certain EU member areas, to collective enforcement of individuals’ data rights.