New CCPA Addresses Dark Patterns

First I had heard of this, the definition of  'dark patterns' seems quite loose. 

California Passes Regulation Banning 'Dark Patterns' Under Landmark Privacy Law

in Gizmodo, Brianna Provenzano, March 15, 2021

New rules enacted under California's Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) will bar so-called dark patterns, or underhanded practices used by websites or applications to get users to behave atypically. Examples include website visitors suddenly being redirected to a subscription page, even when they have no interest in the product being marketed. According to an infographic from the California Attorney General's office, dark-pattern strategies rely on "confusing language or unnecessary steps such as forced clicking or scrolling through multiple screens or listening to why you shouldn't opt out of their data sale." The new CCPA regulations will further add a Privacy Options icon, which Internet users can use as a visual cue to opt out of the sale of their personal data.  ... '

Talk: The ACM Code of Ethics vs Snake Oil and Dodgy Development

And directly related to the last post, note the excellent archive of past talks linked to below.

Register Now: "Leveraging the ACM Code of Ethics Against Ethical Snake Oil and Dodgy Development"

Register now for the upcoming ACM TechTalk "Leveraging the ACM Code of Ethics Against Ethical Snake Oil and Dodgy Development,"   presented on Monday, June 8 at 12:00 PM ET/9:00 AM PT by Don Gotterbarn, Professor Emeritus at East Tennessee State University and Co-Chair, ACM Committee on Professional Ethics (COPE); and Marty Wolf, Professor at Bemidji State University; Co-Chair, ACM Committee on Professional Ethics (COPE). Keith Miller, Professor at the University of Missouri – Saint Louis, will moderate the questions and answers session following the talk. Continue the discussion on ACM's Discourse Page.   You can view our entire archive of past ACM TechTalks on demand at https://learning.acm.org/techtalks-archive.

The Ethics of Dark Patterns

A look at 'Dark Patterns',  had not heard the term.  Linking to ACM look at ethics by people that  build such interfaces.

Dark Patterns: Past, Present, and Future in ACMQueue
The evolution of tricky user interfaces
Arvind Narayanan, Arunesh Mathur, Marshini Chetty, and Mihir Kshirsagar

Dark patterns are user interfaces that benefit an online service by leading users into making decisions they might not otherwise make. Some dark patterns deceive users while others covertly manipulate or coerce them into choices that are not in their best interests. A few egregious examples have led to public backlash recently: TurboTax hid its U.S. government-mandated free tax-file program for low-income users on its website to get them to use its paid program;9 Facebook asked users to enter phone numbers for two-factor authentication but then used those numbers to serve targeted ads;31 Match.com knowingly let scammers generate fake messages of interest in its online dating app to get users to sign up for its paid service.13 Many dark patterns have been adopted on a large scale across the web. Figure 1 shows a deceptive countdown timer dark pattern on JustFab. The advertised offer remains valid even after the timer expires. This pattern is a common tactic—a recent study found such deceptive countdown timers on 140 shopping websites. ... "

Dark Malicious Patterns

A term I had not seen before, but its wide use for malicious activities in smartphones is described here.   Considerable detail below.

A Vector for Skulduggery   By Paul Marks in CACM
March 31, 2020

Dark Patterns.

An analysis of hundreds of popular smartphone apps found that 95% of them have user interfaces that use "Dark Patterns," maliciously crafted menus, buttons, and sliders designed to deceive users into either buying goods or services they do not want, or leading them into unknowingly selecting risky privacy settings.

Dark Patterns are a well-known vector for skulduggery on websites, and have been studied and called out over the last decade, most notably by the name-and-shame website darkpatterns.org, founded by Brighton, U.K.-based user experience (UX) specialist and cognitive scientist Harry Brignull. It was Brignull who first coined the term Dark Pattern (DP).

The chief types of malicious activity DPs enable include sneaking unwanted items (like insurance for other goods being bought) into online shopping baskets, signing users up to expensive recurring magazine subscriptions, or misleading people with preselected sliders labelled with baffling double-negative instructions (like "uncheck here not to download the add-on").

How prevalent Dark Patterns are in the smartphone app arena, rather than regular websites, was not known, so a team of human-computer interaction experts led by Linda di Geronimo, formerly of the University of Zurich, Switzerland, (and now technical cooperation manager in the Zurich Research Center of Huawei), set out to find out just how pervasive Dark Patterns are in the mobile arena.  ... "