Mainstream Media’s Most Useful Tools: Deception, Obfuscation & Dark Patterns

Conning folks to reveal personal information, even just providing an email address, luring consumers into their corporate webs… very sticky spider webs… to elicit subscriptions, to open marketing doors, track who you are (often sold and contributed to a much larger database increasingly to define who you are, what you like and what economic/political factors you embrace) and revealing what topics or products interest you.

Suggest you are pregnant, getting married or divorced, looking for work, older, younger, etc.…. and your text and email inboxes are soon flooded with inquiries, products and issue-related solicitations from sites you never approached. Selling personal information, of any kind, to datacenters creates a huge online profile of detailed information about you that would probably terrify you. Such information not only opens doors to online sellers, it also impacts your credit rating. For example, folks getting divorced just might find their credit score plunging.

Europe is light years ahead of the United States with their General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and comprehensive additional complementary laws, but we have a dearth of US federal legislation protecting privacy. Congress has become a vast wasteland of highly paid legislators unable to draft and pass meaningful bills. This last Congressional delegation produced less than 10% of the bills that the preceding congressional delegation did. States have stepped into the void creating a maze of local requirements that vary across the land, making enforcement difficult, especially for websites in other countries reaching into to the United States.

The various traditional federal consumer protection agencies are still lumbering under the massive defunding during the Trump administration. The remaining federal agencies with any hope of control, like the Federal Trade Commission of the Securities and Exchange Commission, struggle to apply existing laws passed in a different era. California, of course, leads the pack in consumer protection, but Liz Weston (a certified financial planner), writing for the December 17th Los Angeles Times, drills down on what it still looks like in the consumer trenches:

“See if any of this sounds familiar: …You can’t find an easy way to cancel an unwanted subscription, so you let it continue for another month — telling yourself you’ll try again later… You feel rushed into an online purchase you regret, but there’s no option to undo the transaction or demand a refund… You want to read an article or shop at a store online, but you’re bombarded with pop-up requests for your data. There’s no easy option for saying no, so you click “allow” just to get the annoying pop-up out of the way… These are just a few examples of ‘dark patterns,’ intentionally deceptive designs that companies use to steer people into making choices that aren’t in the consumers’ best interest.

“Dark patterns may sound like a feature of sketchy websites, but these manipulative practices are a common way mainstream companies dupe people into sacrificing their privacy or paying for stuff they don’t really want… Buttons that allow sites to scoop up and sell your data may be prominent, while the buttons for opting out are obscured. Retail sites may use a countdown timer to imply a deal is about to expire, when in reality there’s no deadline. Or you might see a fake low-stock warning — ‘Hurry, limited quantities left’ — that pressures you to buy… Making something easy to buy but hard to cancel is another common goal of dark patterns.

“The Federal Trade Commission issued a report last year on the rise of dark patterns and since then has taken action against several companies, including online retailer Amazon and Epic Games, which makes the ‘Fortnite’ video game… In March, Epic Games agreed to pay consumers $245 million to settle FTC charges it tricked users into making unwanted purchases, allowed children to rack up unauthorized charges and deliberately made refund options hard to find.

“Then in June, the FTC filed a complaint alleging Amazon duped people into signing up for Amazon Prime subscriptions and then designed a “labyrinthine” cancellation process. ‘Fittingly, Amazon named that process ‘Iliad,’ which refers to Homer’s epic about the long, arduous Trojan War,’ the complaint notes… (Subscriptions that are easy to sign up for and hard to cancel are known as ‘roach motels,’ according to Deceptive Patterns, a website that tracks dark patterns.)” Small corporate abusers are too expensive to rein in, but the monolith, mega-billion (trillion?) dollar abusers can throw legions of highly compensated “top of their law school class” in-house and out-sourced legal teams to battle any state or federal agency attempt to regulate.

And other than the MAGA GOP’s desire to open mega-social media to conspiracy theories – hence Congressional hearings over Section 230 of the federal Communications Decency Act of 1996, a statute that protects internet service providers and website companies from being held liable for most content created by users of their services, including content that could be considered false or defamatory – their mantra is simply to reduce or eliminate anything that in fact protects consumers from malign business priorities and practices.

Arguing that regulatory agencies are part of some nefarious anti-business “deep state,” draining taxpayer money and moving the country into radical, leftwing “creeping socialism,” the MAGA GOP wants to leave the average US consumer dangling by a thread in a torrential storm of unbridled but very savvy bullies sapping consumers bank accounts and extracting an aggregated encyclopedic cache of their individual and most personal information… without hope or recourse.

I’m Peter Dekom, and it’s time to stop electing legislators who sponsor a wild west world of anything goes and choose those who actually care about the day-to-day struggles with life that face most of us.