How Facebook and Other Sites Manipulate Your Privacy Choices

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for nutherguy:

How Facebook and Other Sites Manipulate Your Privacy Choices:

Electronic Frontier Foundation was fed up with Facebook's pushy interface. The platform had a way of coercing people into giving up more and more of their privacy. The question was, what to call that coercion? Zuckermining? Facebaiting? Was it a Zuckerpunch? The name that eventually stuck: Privacy Zuckering, or when "you are tricked into publicly sharing more information about yourself than you really intended to."

[...] Researchers call these design and wording decisions "dark patterns," a term applied to UX that tries to manipulate your choices. When Instagram repeatedly nags you to "please turn on notifications," and doesn't present an option to decline? That's a dark pattern. When LinkedIn shows you part of an InMail message in your email, but forces you to visit the platform to read more? Also a dark pattern. When Facebook redirects you to "log out" when you try to deactivate or delete your account? That's a dark pattern too.

Dark patterns show up all over the web, nudging people to subscribe to newsletters, add items to their carts, or sign up for services. But, says says Colin Gray, a human-computer interaction researcher at Purdue University, they're particularly insidious "when you're deciding what privacy rights to give away, what data you're willing to part with." Gray has been studying dark patterns since 2015. He and his research team have identified five basic types: nagging, obstruction, sneaking, interface interference, and forced action. All of those show up in privacy controls. He and other researchers in the field have noticed the cognitive dissonance between Silicon Valley's grand overtures toward privacy and the tools to modulate these choices, which remain filled with confusing language, manipulative design, and other features designed to leech more data.

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