Hello. I'm Ryan Cook, and this is Civic Tech Chat, a show that looks at the way technology, politics, and policy impacts the world around us. The tools we use, the way services are delivered, and how we talk about and set policy all shape our society. We'll gather around and have a chat about these things together and more. Either that, or maybe I'll rant about a topic for a while. Before we get started, I do wanna let you all know that we've started a Discord for the podcast. There will be a link with an invite down in the episode description. Do feel free to go check that out. It's a small community right now, but hoping to grow it. It's a great way to reach out to me and let me know things that you might want us to cover, or to just hang out and talk about civic tech. Anyway, let's go ahead and start the show. Today, we'll be talking about dark patterns, quite the ominous sounding phrase. Dark patterns are uses of tech design and technology we use every day that are meant to push you towards something that those behind the tech want you to do, even if it's not something you might otherwise choose to do. These often use techniques that can be deceptive or play the human psyche in a way that's ethically challenging. An example of this could be found in those confirmation boxes you often see when newsletter pop ups come. You know, they might say something like, no thanks. I hate saving money, or no. That's okay. The puppies can be sacrificed. Okay. I made that last one up. At least I hope. I found an interesting example mentioned in a piece from wrongcantur.net, which I hope I pronounced correctly, that mentions a travel website that would tell you that 38 people are looking at this flight. What's interesting though is someone dug in and looked at the source code for that website, and it turned out that it was just randomly generating a number between twenty eight and forty five. So a thing that seemed like it would be a helpful thing, you know, letting you know that, hey, this flight was being looked at, maybe promoting some urgency in your behavior, just turned out it was something that was being done artificially to get that urgency to happen in you, even if no one was looking at the flight. According to darkpatterns.org, there are 12 different categories of dark patterns that get used, and I'm gonna go ahead and try to speed run you through them. There's trick questions, basically when the question is worded in a way that tries to get you to answer it in the way they want you to. There's the sneak into basket, where they pull a sneaky and put another item in your cart, giving you a confusion confusing option to opt out of it. Then there's the roach motel, which sets up a scenario where it's easy to get into, but hard to get out of, like a subscription with a trial that's very difficult to cancel. There's privacy zuckering, which is tricking you into sharing more information than you intended, which funny enough is named after Mark Zuckerberg. Definitely not a shout out Facebook there. There's price comparison prevention, where they make it hard for you to compare the price of multiple things, which obviously would then make making a choice harder. Misdirection, which uses visual elements to move your attention away from one thing to another thing. You know, it's kind of like the tech version of when your friend yells, hey, look over there, and you look even if you didn't really want to. It's just a reaction. There's also hidden costs. When you go to checkout and all of a sudden there's a bunch of hidden fees that you weren't expecting just there in your cart. There's the bait and switch. Fairly self explanatory, but you know, you go to do one thing and an unwanted thing happens instead. We move on to confirm shaving, where you get guilted into doing something, very much like that example I used at the beginning with the newsletter pop up. Disguised ads, which are ads that are disguised as if they're legitimate content. That's totally not an ad. And forced con continuity, which is when your free trial ends and they just start charging your credit card silently, like no warning at all that your trial was gonna end. And, if you top that off with the making it hard to cancel thing we talked about, well, this one can become quite a frustrating doozy. And lastly, we have friend spam. The annoying thing where an app asks for your permissions, maybe your contact list, some social media app, or your email, and then all of a sudden just start spamming all your friends with information about their service. So why talk about this now? Well, it turns out that Google is getting sued around this sort of thing, and the attorneys general from DC and three other states started that lawsuit on the January 24. Lawsuit alleges that Google has built its software in a way that enriches them through the deception of its users. For instance, they're suggesting that Google intentionally designs its settings to be somewhat difficult to navigate or confusing so that they're less likely to opt out of things. Think data collection stuff like your location or your search history. You might be wondering how these dark patterns actually cause harm. If you think back on the types that we walked through, the speed run just before, you can see that there's some pretty concrete ways those deceptions could become harmful. Some of them would lead directly to someone overspending, maybe spending money they might not have otherwise consented to spend, which, could certainly be hurtful if you're in a position where you need to have that money. Another example would be someone ending up a situation where they're sacrificing more of their privacy, either without realizing it or to a greater extent than they were led to believe. Maybe they think they're sharing just a bit about their personal lives, but then it turns out, well no, the information you're giving is gonna lead to a great deal more being revealed. But then I one would wonder like, okay, so do these tactics actually work? Do they actually cause the harm? Do they do the thing that you're talking about Ryan? And there's some interesting information here. There is a part of a study that's titled shining a dark light on dark patterns, which sought to answer this question through some experimentation. They set up a bait and switch type thing for their test and tried out some scenarios where the people involved were basically supposed to think that their own money was at was at stake. They had a mild version and a more aggressive version of the deception being used, and they basically tried to do a comparison between those and then when no deception was used. And what's interesting about this is that when no tactics were employed, they wound up with an acceptance rate of like 11.3%. When they upped it to using mild tactics, that rate goes up to 25.8%. And when they went up to aggressive tactics, it shoots up further to 41.9%. Granted this is, you know, one study and I don't believe they're making a causal claim, but it does seem to indicate some sort of strong relationship between the severity of dark pattern aggressiveness, you know, severity of the dark pattern being used, and the effectiveness of it to get a higher acceptance rate. So let's say we establish that, you know, harm can be done, that some of these tactics may be effective. Is this practice even common? Is this like a real problem out in the world? And this is also something where some amount of study has been done. A sample was done of 11,000 shopping sites done by Princeton University and the University of Chicago, and in their sample data they found that 11.1% of the sites in it had some dark pattern present. They also ended up finding a correlation between a website's popularity and the likelihood of it having a dark pattern. So then we've established that this is potentially a problem in the space, the thing that's probably going on. I would imagine then that there's probably something going on in public policy to attempt to address it. And the answer to that is there's some stuff going on that one can look at. In particular, the Federal Trade Commission released an enforcement policy statement late last year, I believe it was October, that warned companies that they're going to seek to go after them if they do legally deceptive practices around subscriptions. And that could end up leading to legal action like lawsuits and the like. And one thing that's interesting about this is that they lined out kind of what they called the three clear requirements for it. As far as if you wanted to avoid legal action. The first one of those is that there should be clear disclosure of the terms of the subscription in question. Importantly they mention the idea of revealing costs and the way one might stop themselves from being charged in the future. Those, those two bits are pretty important. I would think as they tie directly to one of the dark pattern types that we talked about. They also mentioned the idea of Informed Consent, which basically is, you know, before you charge somebody for stuff, you need to ensure the customer is actually saying yes to something with proper information. There can't be something hidden lurking that they don't know about that maybe would have caused them to make a different decision, but you hid it from them and therefore they ended up consenting without that bit of knowledge. And then also, easy and simple cancellation. This one sounds great. Basically the idea is that it should be just as easy to cancel the service, as it was to sign up for it in the first place. Basically trying to eliminate that roach motel style of deception. We're gonna make it really easy to get in, but then very difficult to cancel. There has also been action at the state level. California and Colorado have both passed legislation of their own banning the use of dark patterns. Violations in those cases can lead to fines, which for California is a heaping $7,500 per violation, which maybe individually doesn't sound like a lot, especially to a big company, but it's per violation. So if it's an application that has many many users, that dollar value can start to add up quickly. So where does this leave us? Frankly, to me, this seems a lot like an extension of a thing that people have always done. People have always tried to trick others out of their money, out of their time, their valuables, in order to fulfill greed for lack of a better way to put it. If it turns out that we see enough punitive action take place, whether that's through the FTC, through the various states, or other policy change, then maybe we could see the cost benefit analysis these organizations are making that says, Hey, it's more profitable to do this and risk the penalty than it is not to. Maybe if that shifts they won't engage as much in the behavior. At least that's what the, Game Theory class in grad school told me it should happen. In the meantime though, it's unfortunately something that you'll want to keep an eye out for as you're out in the world using your tech. Thanks so much for your time and attention, and I will catch you next time. You can follow us on Twitter using the handle at CivicTechChat, visit us on the web at civictech.chat, or subscribe to us for content updates wherever it is you download your podcasts.