Substack now won't even tell you what the newsletters are that its dark pattern post-sign-up screen is tricking you into almost certainly accidently subscribing you to. This particular UX has the distinction of getting worse and more manipulative literally every time I see it.

Excited to announce a new paper on dark patterns and competition online! You’ve seen cookie banners all over the internet, some with dark patterns that make it hard to reject cookies. We conducted a field experiment about these banners to study how people choose to share their

"the “DMA fork” of iOS is the version of iOS I’ve wanted [...] it’s a more flexible and fun version of iOS predicated upon the assumption that users deserve options to control more aspects of how their expensive pocket computers should work" macstories.net/linked/the-dma…

Grocery store prices are already too high, and far too many DC residents live in food deserts. The $25 billion Kroger-Albertson merger is a bad deal for both DC grocery workers and consumers. We sued to block it with the FTC and eight states. Today our lawsuit goes to court.

Special shout-out to Domino's Pizza for their deceptive use of trick questions/double negative Deceptive Patterns to lure customers into signing up for their direct marketing.

In DC, RealPage illegally colluded with corporate landlords — resulting in higher rents for thousands of residents. So we sued to stop them and drive down housing costs. Now, U.S. Department of Justice and eight more states are joining the fight against RealPage's anticompetitive tactics.

My new report shows how today's cybersecurity and risk profiling systems are turning into employee mass surveillance and predictive policing systems. I think we need a serious debate about what is necessary+proportionate for what purpose, and the safeguards that prevent misuse:

Cracked Labs (Wolfie Christl) reveals the extensive reach of today’s employee monitoring practices. Jeevan and I shared our insights in an interview with The Register. Check out the full story here ⬇️ #Privacy #Surveillance #EmployeeRights theregister.com/2024/08/27/mic…

If anyone else is moving over to bluesky, we have an account there too: @deceptivepatterns.bsky.social Please say hi!

Care.com is owned by Barry Diller, the billionaire who recently called for Lina Khan to be fired. I guess now we know why.

New AI lawsuit filed today: A group of voice actors sued Eleven Labs, accusing the text-to-speech service of training its AI voice models using the actors' audiobook recordings.

Dark Pattern Observation Of The Day: My Microsoft Edge on my desktop automatically launches the tabs My Google Chrome last shut down with. Like the universe is conspiring to get me pulled towards Microsoft core but I am also the resistance. Think about it, is that really dark?

this dark UX is so dark it’s literally dark

CPPA Enforcement Advisory Stresses the Importance of Avoiding Dark Patterns cppa.ca.gov/pdf/enfadvisor…

In the words of #privacyflorence+themachine: "The pattern is always darkest before the dawn" - California Privacy Protection Agency issues enforcement advisory on dark patterns. What do you need to know? 🔹Don't say you didn't mean to: “Dark patterns aren’t about intent, they’re about effect,” said

I took another look at Snowden docs that mention browser/cookie IDs. It's breathtaking how the surveillance marketing industry has still managed to claim for many years that unique personal IDs processed in the web browser are somehow 'anonymous', and sometimes still does.

Dark Pattern Alert 🚨 I've a health insurance with Care Insurance , and renewal is due this month when I went to Renew it, noticed they added Care Shield add-on by default, they mention that you can unselect addons from the edit screen but you can't

Equivocator™ Domino's Pizza Deceptive Patterns Could be worse - saw this from Avanti Travel Insurance this week: which you have to tick a box to update your preferences and then you get the option to untick being on the lists. (Which is very confusing)

Not sure if this is strictly a #darkpattern or not but Reddit, Inc. is basically unusable in a mobile web browser now Deceptive Patterns