LinkedIn suffered a class-action lawsuit for their email spam! I didn't know that, good to hear. I left years ago and remember it difficult to leave (lack of close account function, and kept receiving emails after unsubscribing).
On dark patterns, or at least it felt dark... I was booking an overnight ferry trip across Bass Strait in Australia. After selecting the fare, entering my details about my car make and model, name and address, cabin choice etc, and about to enter credit card details, the website proclaims "our real-time fare system has adjusted the price" and my fare went up $40 right there and then on the final step of the booking process. Not happy.
I hate this, because it's made me cynical. I don't even try to un-subscribe from emails like this anymore, I just mark them as spam. And that hurts the good companies that do listen and unsubscribe you easily, because now they are being looked at as spammy.
If I didn't run my own mail systems, that's what I would do.
Instead, I just blacklist the sender's IP address. It's even nicer when the sender (e.g. LinkedIn) publishes TXT RRs for SPF in their DNS zone as it allows me to easily blacklist all of them.
Note that as more senders use mail service providers, comprehensive blocking of all SPF records may have considerable collateral damage.
Whether you consider this good or bad may vary: it means MSPs have a valid claim that senders exercise Good Citizen practices on all mailings, not just those circulating via the MSP.
Then there are the major players. Yahoo's been a freaking PITA for years on outbound spam (both spam and joe-job bounces), with no effective reporting mechanism. Gmail's been largely better IME, other providers vary.
At least from a MailChimp perspective at least those emails all come with unsubscribe links and such in them and I have found MailChimp to actually honor those. It's the ones that aren't from MailChimp, et al that I think twice before clicking unsubscribe on because it could just be a ruse to prove its a live account.
That's the problem though: The bad players are hurting the good players. I don't unsubscribe from stuff using mailchimp, because I'm just not going to take the time to learn which systems are legit and will unsubscribe you, and which ones are shady.
So in this case, mailchimp is getting marked as spam, even though they are an honest player.
I think that's exactly the right thing to do. If someone wants to make use of your time and attention for their own advantage, they should ask for permission. Someone who does so without asking for permission first is exactly what spam filters are for. It's not my job to help them with finding people that want to read their advertisements.
That's valid, I'm sure I've done the same more times than I know. My general rule is if it's from a brand or site I know I've interacted with or generally recognize I'll spend two seconds to check the unsub options.
If the unsub requires me to log in first, I mark it spam instead. If the link looks fishy and/or I can't readily discern it's of any quality it's spam. If I have no clue why I could've gotten the message it gets flagged for sure.
Luckily for me I get very few emails per month that I don't know why I would've gotten them, so it isn't a painful exercise to give them a chance to not get flagged.
I use Unroll.me[0] to manage the messages I do want to get, but want to check on my own time and I don't want them sitting in my inbox. I'm sure there are other types of services, but I'm generally happy with what they do. They also can manage a lot of the opt-out features as well, not sure if it 'protects' me any more than doing it myself though.
Mailchimp requires senders to have proof that you signed up, and my experience is that they are very responsive to inquiries disputing that the proof exists.
A similar thing happened to me the other day as well (oddly enough, also in Australia).
I was buying a ticket for a football game, but just to make sure there wasn't a better seat I clicked the back button on my browser to go back to looking at seats. Suddenly I saw that the same seat had gone up by 10% in price.
Anyway, I pressed the forward button to see if the new price would apply, but it didn't. So I somehow avoided paying an extra 10% because their confirmation page was cached, but not the seat selection page.
Why? What does browsing incognito give you? Surely it doesn't give you cheaper flights. Rates are not raised because you've been browsing them for awhile
> Rates are not raised because you've been browsing them for awhile
That's exactly what they do. If you're browsing for plane tickets and you're a bit undecisive (like me), don't be surprised if the prices go up by 200% for that specific day you wanted to book. Going incognito and in some cases returning after a hour will bring the prices back down.
Debunked by what exactly? Can you prove/guarantee it's not happening?
While I don't have any other evidence than my pretty specific anecdotal experience to prove it's true (in addition to what friends in the airline industry told me), it is common knowledge that price discrimination is a pretty fundamental aspect of airline pricing so this "myth" is not that inconceivable.
It's impossible to prove that this is impossible, because you can always claim that I wasn't targeted for some reason. I have however tested it myself several times and never found any difference when looking at the same site cookieless and cookied—at the exact same time.
That being said, a lot of people have done testing of this and found no evidence of repeated cookies specifically leading to higher prices. Here are some of the links I've found:
I'm not disputing that price discrimination happens. Just that by far the biggest determinant of it is time, as airlines constantly publish and unpublish different fare buckets.
In fact, what I suspect is happening when people see lower fares is just caching. All OTAs heavily cache prices in search results and then only fetch the updated price once you drill into results. I could easily imagine a scenario where the prices has actually gone up, but users in incognito (who haven't drilled down yet) see the old, outdated price.
The notion of specific price discrimination on specific users by cookies doesn't make sense though. For one thing, I don't see how it could possibly work technically. Information on airline prices flows in direction—airlines are constantly telling aggregators the latest prices/fare buckets, which the aggregators then display to users. Aggregators don't make a request to the airline for pricing every time you search, so how would they even know to update your price based on previous activity?
I've done this with 2 browsers looking for a car on the same site and they will have different prices. I generally never log in on chrome anywhere and only use it for twitch so it was a lot cheaper than my firefox that's logged in everywhere. Like $150 on a $300 ticket.
My car is nothing special. They would claim that prices change due to other people booking while you're going through the process, but I don't believe that.
I was booking well in advance - more than a month, and I was using the site after midnight.
There should be regulation against changing a price that is advertised, at least lock it in for a minimum of 5 or 10 minutes of selecting the fare. Bumping the fare up at the last step only a couple of minutes later is highly suspicious.
Signed up for pickydomains a while back, they send me emails every time there's a new listing. I decide I don't want to get the email anymore. Click the unsubscribe link. They want me to sign in. I sign in, and am unable to do anything without agreeing to their changed Terms of Service.
In other words, I have no way to get them to stop emailing me without agreeing to new terms.
Similarly, I once signed up for a trial of IBD newspaper. I still get emails from them occasionally (although those at least go to spam), and the unsubscribe link requires a sign in, which I don't remember. I could probably reset my password if I cared enough, though.
(These are just the two I remember, I'm sure there's been others that were similar. I had an issue with PayPal spam at one point as well but it was more complicated.)
As far as I can tell, both of those are in violation of the CANSPAM act. Companies are required to offer an opt out link with no additional requirements to opt out. But there's no consumer right of action, so the only one who can enforce it is the government, and they focus on worse spammers, so real businesses that are just aggressive mostly get off free.
Depending on where you and the company are, you can actually sue them.
EDIT: To clarify: in Germany you can sue companies for spam and making the opt-out unnecessarily difficult. Of course the damages are so trivial you'll likely overpay but there are enough bored lawyers that these things tend to happen every now and then.
I looked up the federal law at one point and private individuals had no rights beyond reporting to the FTC. ISPs may have standing if they can show harm.
I see now that the majority of this document could have expired. Not sure where to find these "notes" that the document talks about. It also says federal law would preempt. So yeah... talk to a lawyer I guess!
Unsubscribing is a waste of time. Even when they do stop the spam, in 99% of the time it is only temporary and after a few months they start again. Deletable email aliases is the solution. If they spam you, you show them the finger and delete the alias.
That's true for actual spammers (i.e. if they buy your address from a list and so on) but not for legitimate companies. Both examples I gave are real companies that I signed up for. I'm pretty sure if I managed to unsubscribe they would honor it.
Looking at my spam folder: Air France, freelancer.com, Addison Lee, Pluralsight, etc. I gave up playing whack a mole with unsubsubribe links that never get honored. I now filter emails automatically by domain name and/or keyword (for the companies that got my email before I switched to this alias system).
That had been my experience for quite some time. More recently it seems to actually have some effect.
As I'd just noted in another comment, many senders use a mail service provider, and a single bad actor can have very bad knock-on consequences, even for mail which doesn't transit the MSP (SPF records listing MSP IP space).
For many major brands / companies, unsubscribes work reasonably well. I've seen some success with this, don't offer email addresses generally, and flag the remainder as spam, with blackhole rules in my various filtering tools.
The larger problem with email is I simply don't trust it any more.
Facebook is pretty guilty of this too. I "deleted my account" on Facebook years ago and the only effect this had was that I lost access make changes to my account. The account still exists and still is accessible[1], albeit with outdated information. I have no doubt they're still making money off my data.
It wouldn't surprise me if Facebook created profiles for people who've never used it, just by virtue of having enough of their friends having their contact details. IE if 5 people are friends and all have "fred bloggs" in their contact list then there's a good chance it's the same "fred bloggs". I'm not sure what this virtual person is worth to advertisers, though, just like I'm not sure what you're worth if you don't use it any more.
That doesn't sound right. Have you tried logging into it again? If you can, you should be able to follow these instructions then which really do permanently delete the account:
To help companies gauge where their techniques fall along the persuasive-to-manipulative spectrum, Chris Nodder, a user-experience consultant in Seattle, has developed guidelines for ethical conduct. Systems that nudge people to act in the public interest are “charitable,” he told me, while products like Fitbit, which may help people develop better habits, are “motivational. “If the company benefits more than the consumer, I would call it ‘evil design,’” said Mr. Nodder, who wrote a book on the topic called “Evil by Design.” If an approach benefits the company and the customer equally, he added, “you are probably in the realm of ‘commercial design.’”
I find it surprising that the researcher apparently makes the distinction whether a certain UI is "dark" or not depending on what it is used for.
As a customer, unless I signed up with the explicit goal of habit-change (e.g. for a fitness service) I would very much not like to be manipulated no matter if the cause is "good" or not.
> I would very much not like to be manipulated no matter if the cause is "good" or not.
The problem is the definition of "manipulated" is not black and white. Consider the relatively recent change in StubHub's fee model. Consumers will always tell you they hate having a service fee tacked on at the last minute when checking out. So, for a while, StubHub tried all-inclusive pricing on their search results, and consumers said they liked the change. However, it ended up tanking their conversion rates. When they A/B tested putting the fee on last, they immediately saw an increase in shoppers willing to buy.
Is this manipulation? The fee was still clearly stated on checkout, but I imagine the subconscious thought process of shoppers was "well, crap, I've already made it this far, I just want these tickets now."
I agree some of the outright "tricking" examples from the article are over the line, but most forms of marketing are manipulation in some respect. When does "persuasion" become "manipulation"?
I see that as a very clear example of manipulation, actually.
They presented a meaningless price when in situations where potential customers would compare them with competitors. Only when they can be sure that a customer would likely not check the price anymore (because they think they already know it or because of psychological reasons), they show the actual amount.
That's a very clear case of improving their own situation (better conversion rates) by worsening their customers' situation (higher likelihood of overspending, reduced ability to compare prices) and making them act against their own interests. This would be manipulation by the all of article's criteria.
Of course as a company you can decide do use that strategy - it's not your job to think for your your customers. But don't be surprised if consumer advocacy groups flag you and at some point you find people demanding a law against that practice.
More generally, I'd draw the line to "marketing" if you supply information to the customer that's either meaningless or misleads the customer, but could not possibly help them reach their own goals. (As in this case presenting an amount in the search results that has no practical relevance.)
I'd draw the line to "manipulation" even earlier, if you make a person act in a way that's against their own conscious interests in the moment. As I said, there can be rare cases in which that manipulation could even be wanted by the person, but I don't see that changing the fact that it's manipulation. It's different from "persuasion" where you make the person change their interests.
But if more people buy the product in the fee at the end situation, doesnt that mean that they really prefer a fee at the end? It is just as irrational to not buy the product as to buy it in either scenario, since the price is the same.
You're starting with the prior that buying stuff is bad and should be discouraged in general. This is quite arguable.
>But if more people buy the product in the fee at the end situation, doesn't that mean that they really prefer a fee at the end?
Nope. Otherwise people should absolutely love my approach of forcing them to buy at gunpoint - perfect conversion rate!
Even if you assume that the data implies customers prefer the fee at the end, you'd also have to research why they do so - and solve the mystery of why your statistic suggests they prefer the fee at the end, yet direct user feedback suggests the opposite.
>It is just as irrational to not buy the product as to buy it in either scenario, since the price is the same.
That kind of rationality requires perfect information. But it is likely that the price appears lower in the fee-at-end-case, because that is the only effect that the change has - so perfect information is not given. As the price is in fact the same as you say, that would make fee-at-end the case with irrational behavior.
>You're starting with the prior that buying stuff is bad and should be discouraged in general. This is quite arguable.
No, my premise is that buying stuff while you don't know the price is bad, which I think is a commonly accepted sentiment.
In the US, retail sales taxes are never applied until checkout (a practice that drives friends of mine from overseas crazy because they aren't used to it). Is that false advertising? I'd argue that putting the taxes in up front would be MORE confusing because that's what people expect.
Suppose I were to advertise a car for $18000 where the best deal at an equivalent dealer is $19900. When you arrive at my store, you find I only sell it for $20000, and that I never sold any at $18000. The prices on each of these cars is clearly displayed, and at the time you are looking at the car, it is clearly priced at $20000.
Say people come to the store after having seen the advertisement, but when they arrive they decide that after coming here all the way, they don't care to save $100 and they buy the car.
It is conceivable (even probable) here that if I had honestly advertised it as $20000, few would have come. Therefore, making this change would increase my conversion rates on my advertisements. The argument stated by you would mean that my behaviour is defensible, and that I should advertise prices I do not intend to deliver, allowing advertisement conversion rates to be my guide.
However, that's a classic bait-and-switch scam, a kind that is illegal in the US, and I doubt you'd find anyone who'd support it.
>Is this manipulation? The fee was still clearly stated on checkout //
That instance seems very clearly manipulation. When the cost is known people don't buy, only when they've sunk time on the process do they buy - probably because they have to assume other sites in the field are equally manipulative.
Unless the full cost is available without going through the sales funnel I'd say it's fraud.
If they robbed 30 minutes from me because they deceived me with their falsely advertised price I consider that pretty close to fraud if not within the legal definition per se.
> “If the company benefits more than the consumer, I would call it ‘evil design,’” said Mr. Nodder, who wrote a book on the topic called “Evil by Design.”
That is stunningly poor reasoning. It doesn't matter whether a company benefits more than you do as long as you are not harmed. Not all games are zero-sum. Thinking you should be getting more or equal to the other party is not harm, it's envy.
I would say it does matter if a company benefits more than I do, but makes out like it doesn't. Any fair transaction should surely balance? In the end, nobody likes being deceived or presented with false information, even happy customers.
I don't think that's true, because a company could have the means to do something profitably that an individual couldn't. For example, I just changed the toner cartridges on my printer, and HP provided UPS stickers so I can send the old ones back for "recycling", which is obviously just them filling them back up and selling them to someone else. Let's assume they just made $20 on the deal. That doesn't mean I'd have $20 if I'd kept them, because to me, lacking a factory to refurbish them, they're just garbage. Same goes for all of that personal information Google and Facebook make money on -- you can't go down to the pawn shop and sell your own information, because it only matters in bulk.
Except it's not always easy to see if you're actually harmed or not. In the toner case, the UPS sticker is also a (very gentle) nudge away from trying to refill the cartridge yourself using a cheaper service.
As for the personal information, there is an entertaining talk[1] by Pinboard's Maciej Cegłowski about how we can't even know if collected personal information will at some point come back to hurt you or not.
The ultimate problem with such dark patterns is that they darken the prospects for all participants.
I'veb been long aware of such trends. Something as simple as a multi-step transaction process, across multiple screens. I literally cannot see what the end-stage requests will be before committing. If I don't bug out immediately, I'll just throw random inputs at the page to see what the hell it does.
But it's another reason why I'll strongly prefer in-store, brick-and-morter purchases, or anything that doesn't have a service contract (the "agree to our new ToS to cancel your account" story below really puts the shine and hurt on this), etc.
Much as the whole microlawsuits thing sounds like an absolute PITA, something which reduces frictions for consumers to sue would be interesting. Respond to failed opt-out tools with a claim for damages and costs....
> Something as simple as a multi-step transaction process
Amazon UK has an horrid check-out process that omits any clickable bail-out links, should you want to back-up to change something you have to edit the URL bar.
They also only provide a total for all postage, on one page, with no break-out of what applies to which item ( from multiple vendors ).
I assume it's meant to be slick and non-distracting but it feels like a greased laundry chute through which you are sliding...
They rolled out a go back to browsing mode in the us a few months ago on checkout. I think they looked at the data about how often people want to add one more item especially with the hated "Add on item" and prime. Also how often carts were being abandoned anyway to add more items.
> Whereas Ryanair once placed the insurance opt-out option in a drop-down menu of passengers’ home countries — between Denmark and Finland — it now simply gives passengers the option of adding insurance.
The key last line from this EFF indictment of Facebook[1]: "If a business model wouldn’t work if users had to opt in, it deserves to fail."
To me the entire ad-supported "business model" is the darkest pattern of them all. Please read this comment before a knee-jerk rejection of my claim: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7485773
So far the negative effect on my life of the sum total of tracking and ad-profiling has been - to the best of my knowledge - neglible. (Largely because the ability of companies to use data to my detriment hasn't kept pace with the thirst for collecting it).
In return I've been given free access to a huge amount of free content and free functionality. Plus - very occasionally - the advertising is beneficial rather than merely irrelevant.
They don't care cost of doing business. Internet is an advertising and marketing platform with all the downsides of that. Part of the function of an advertising marketing platform is to gather as much information about users to sell them stuff. That's what pays for billion dollar valuations. This is not going away.
A lot of it could go away with better consumer protection laws and enforcement. I'm not sure why this country puts up with deceptive negative-option rebills. They should just show the sales funnel to 100 random citizens, and ask them how much they think they are going to be charged after going through it. If more than 50 people get the answer wrong, what you are doing is obviously deceptive (Yes this would include things like mortgages and credit card fees).
Because one person or company that is bound to lose millions of dollars, or their entire business model (deceptive advertising and marketing, for one) has more of an incentive to lobby against a regulation than a million unorganized people that might lose 25 or 30 dollars over signing up for a difficult to cancel "membership".
So I clicked on the link and, for the umpteenth time, was greeted by their pop-up saying "we can't go on like this" and asking me to whitelist them on my adblocker. I am a subscriber of their online edition. Oh, the irony.
This is actually a widespread practice among German ISPs. I once fell for this myself.
What they do is that when you order something they automatically add some service most customers almost certainly don't want or need (like a software package or homepage webspace) and that is free for the first months. You cannot remove that from your order, you have to later cancel it manually. As it's free at the beginning new customers checking their bill won't notice it as something odd (it's some free addon, why care?). Then after some time it starts costing a fee.
That sort of thing is now illegal in the UK and most likely in Germany too. The trouble is that there are no penalties beyond individual refunds and not enough people are aware of their rights for it to have a significant impact.
Not sure who you are referring to (wouldn't be surprised if you are thinking of Telekom though) but at least 1&1 and NetCologne only try to upsell you throughout the entire process but don't automatically add this kind of stuff.
I'd call Meetup a different case; as someone who actively uses the service, both as Organizer & Member... I need to know if someone knew signed up to my Meetup so I can send the a message and engage them. Or if a new group started up competing with me (or groups I'm a member of). My own RSVP notifications are obvious. Sorry, but the email Meetup sends is literally integral to the function of the service.
On the LinkedIn issues, this tweet surely is the funniest: https://twitter.com/darylginn/status/590664399041519617
On dark patterns, or at least it felt dark... I was booking an overnight ferry trip across Bass Strait in Australia. After selecting the fare, entering my details about my car make and model, name and address, cabin choice etc, and about to enter credit card details, the website proclaims "our real-time fare system has adjusted the price" and my fare went up $40 right there and then on the final step of the booking process. Not happy.