Norwegian Consumer Council Deceived by Design Report

Don’t know if y’all saw this but, the Norwegian Consumer Council released a report on user setting updates released by three companies in response to GDPR, and the Council focused on “how default settings and dark patterns, techniques and features of interface design meant to manipulate users, are used to nudge users towards privacy intrusive options”.  

For background, the term “dark pattern” was popularized <https://darkpatterns.org/> by Harry Brignull as the concept that “Dark Patterns are tricks used in websites and apps that make you buy or sign up for things that you didn’t mean to.”  In practice this means things like buttons being different colors with the less-favored-by-the-developer option in a harder to see/read color.

The full report can be found here — https://fil.forbrukerradet.no/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/2018-06-27-deceived-by-design-final.pdf — and is worth a read.

Best,
Jason