It turns out, though, that it asks that _every_ single time I open the app. It's really annoying and I'm about to allow them only to block them at the OS level.
In design, everything is intentional and I fail to believe these cheap UI tricks were anything other than intended as designed by whoever designed it. Any seasoned UX designer worth their title knows if what they are designing removes their agency in deciding on how to act or if it feels icky or wrong in a manipulative sense.
That's more of a rhetorical point - I don't believe most things related to "morality" can ever be as clear as black/white, ethical/unethical, and think it muddies waters to assert it does.
Considered design does not always exactly equal purer-than-pure ethical design.
Simply put, I would never allow these dark design patterns into the product if I was the designer, by arguing that it would affect perceived trustworthiness of the company and brand credibility if dark patterns start to become pervasive and the norm across the product. As a professional UX designer, it's my duty to be the voice of the user and I'd put my neck on the line to make sure I voiced my concern before they went over my head and implemented dark patterns. I'll never sign off on it.
The issue is a lack of accountability by designers/PMs who hide behind the company name when these dark patterns are exposed. In an era when companies like Facebook sway political elections through their dark pattern designed newsfeeds, watchdog groups and regulatory bodies need to be created to keep them in check.
For example it is entirely plausible that the sms notification being sent once you put in a 2FA number is completely unrelated. In a normalised database there will only be one phone number for multiple uses. If notifications are set to send to the phone number by default and 2fa uses that phone number the app will not necessarily have knowledge whether the phone number was entered due to a 2fa prompt or something else. It only checks for a phone number and acts accordingly. The 2 people/teams who designed each feature would most probably have no idea how else the number is being used such is the nature of complexity.
No! Normalization does not mean keeping only one copy of each piece of data, regardless of category and context. I see this behavior all the time in junior and even some senior devs, both in databases, and when they code.
A piece of information has a type, but it also has a context. A 2FA phone number is different than a marketing contact phone number. It should never be normalized into just one field.
My favorite example of this is people re-using a constant in multiple places in code just because it happens to have the same value. Imagine you have a constant defined as `USER_DISPLAY_AS = 'first_name'`. Then, somewhere, you are building sorting and want to be able to sort by first name or last name. You notice you already have a constant that contains a value 'first_name', so you use it. Not you have tied two completely different things together in your code because you thought you are being DRY.
I shall dub it "Krystian's Overoptimistic Denormalization Error", or KODE for short.
No matter which metrics you choose, you run the risk of PM's ordering unethical means of increasing those metrics. A bakery can measure itself by sales volume and ensuing revenue numbers - that doesn't by itself prevent bakery managers from adding addictive drugs to the recipes, nor does it mean that those are poor metrics.
What it does mean is a) the company made some poor hiring decisions along the way, and the best way to deal with that problem is by having some b) ethical review board.
I am an American but I am well accustomed to learning that other countries are able to prevent certain consumer abuse before it replicates at massive scale by acting early and adjusting along the way.
Does this happen in Europe?
Abusing the 2FA number is likely illegal in most member states now, and is definitely so at the end of May.
Fucking YouTube and their "Would you like to merge your account with your Google Account and use your real name forever more? Yes / Soon."
If it really is just that asshole prompt that made the difference, then man, did Facebook fuck up. They should have just blocked people from using WhatsApp until they volunteer their data.
I've only had a FB account for a very short while and that was 8 years ago or so, their disrespect for user privacy creeped me out back then already, never went back.
If WhatsApp had forced me to link to a FB account (and thus make a new one), I'd have told my friends "yeah that's nice you can message me on a different platform from now on". And I wouldn't have been the only one.
There's no social network for people refusing to use FB, so we don't know each other :) But there is way more of us than you'd expect (and from many different corners of society too, not just the tech crowd, friend of mine is a doctor and she's very intent on privacy, even if she sometimes lacks the tech knowledge to make the "perfect" choices, she's much more hard core about it than I am, as if I didn't have enough reason already for respecting the hell out of her).
Websites also do that screen-covering style popup on load with the two options like:
Yes I'd love to sign up
I'll sign up later
There's the other type where they imply the user is an idiot for taking the "no" option, as in:
Yes I'd love to sign up
No, I hate great dealsin that interface, and in mac os x as well, it seems it will upgrade at a certain point anyway, no mater what you choose. i always answer remind me later, and i will often come home to my macbook pro or iPad having been restarted due to an upgrade. the macbook is particularly annoying when it upgrades because it leaves about 10 minutes or so of stuff left to do that isn't triggered until i go to unlock my computer. so i come home having something urgent to do, try to wakeup and login to my macbook only to find it needs to finish the installation i never chose to do (or at least never intended to do). and still apple gets away with it.
Are you sure you're laying the blame at the feet of the right people? I'm a design lead on a mobile game and I find myself in a constant battle against these kind of shenanigans with the PM team.
Here in Australia, when you become a software engineer, you join the Engineers of Australia, become a chartered Engineer with some additional civic rights and responsibilities, and swear an oath which includes upholding ethics values, much like doctors swear an oath to do no harm. I hope this kind of thing becomes universal and more prominent with the younger generations. If we want to make the world a better place (and most people who set out to do engineering do), we must put ethics and the good of society above KPIs and profits and individual company valuations.
Most "Bachelor of Software Engineering" degrees offered by Australian universities are EA-accredited and contain mandatory engineering courses that EA requires. Most CS/IT degrees that don't have "Engineering" in the degree name are only accredited by the ACS (or potentially not accredited at all).
I'm also an Australian software "engineer", I don't have an EA-accredited degree, and the more I see of this industry, the less certain I am that we get to claim the mantle of "engineer" with the professional responsibilities that go with it.
And we have the freedom to not use products that mistreat us, I left facebook a year ago and I'll soon install lineageOS on my cellphone, limiting myself to only open source apps.
Oh fuck it I was trying to be nice but this has got me going. In my opinion it's certifiably dillusional to think that Google and Facebook equate to a higher quality of life. Holy shit that's crazy. It's bonafide brainwash.
I've severely scaled back my dependence on Facebook and Google the last few years and I could not be happier. It's made me pursue real social interactions again. My personal laptop is poewered primarily by free and open source software and in the last year or so has become so smooth it's putting macOS to shame (I am not making that up for the sake of argument).
Idk what has convinced you that Facebook and Google equal better life, but I can only pray you wake up some day and remember how to live life that isn't managed by someone else's server...
I should add I don't disagree with society regulating behavior that negatively impacts society, but I don't think your chosen method of arguing that point is intellectually sound. And in this case I really find it hard to imagine how you'd regulate user experience of an opt in service such as these companies are providing.
If wishes were horses then beggars would ride. I prefer to deal with the world as it is rather than the world as I’d like it to be. Also keep in mind that if more people with proactive about their own digital landscapes, they’d be spending more time managing their platforms and less time doing the stuff they actually want to do. It’s solipsistic to think everyone should have YOUR preferred priorities and time allocation.
>idk what has you convinced that Facebook and Google equal better life
Not having to sound like a fussy prig anytime someone wants to get in touch with me is kind of a thing. Not having to have a “well actually, don’t you know that Facebook is bad!?” discussion whenever I meet someone new who wants to stay in touch with me, likewise. It’s like that old joke about “how do you know if someone does CrossFit/is vegan?”
“Real social interactions” means actually being able to participate in the social interactions where people are having them. I don’t know why you think being able to keep in touch with distant family via WhatsApp, or not not having to create extra steps for people who want to send me photos, or not needing to insist on a special process for inviting me to things are all valueless functions. What you’re proposing is like the equivalent of insisting, after the invention and mainstream adoption of the telephone, that people come to your house and drop off a visiting card if they want to speak with you.
It’s our responsibility to call out on bullshit like this.
It's somewhat puzzling to me. Do you really disagree with these practices? Because you are in a (relatively) unique position to do something about it.
Have you ever noticed something that is just wrong in society but couldn't really think of any plan of action to work against it? Maybe you live in one of those places where your vote doesn't really count, one way or the other. Know that feel? Or maybe you recognized injustice somewhere but it's just so far removed from your area of influence that you'd need to upend your life, change career or education to even begin pulling it right.
Of course you can always donate money or I guess, advocate, tell your friends, etc. But that doesn't really do anything (or very indirectly), and you know it in your heart.
This time you have an opportunity. So use it.
On this particular topic, all I can do is encourage you to act and make the world a little bit better. On other topics, I look out and try to notice such opportunities to better the world from my own sphere of influence, and try my hardest to be virtuous and do the right thing (we might not even agree on what is "right", as I don't know you), even if it's hard and it requires exposing myself to risk, going against the grain.
First you pose a seemingly innocent question, like 'would you like to give us your phone number so we can keep your account secure?' or 'would you like to upgrade to new iOS?'. Then you take away the NO option. You replace it with 'i'll decide later'. And by doing so, you make it not a choice for the user. You make it a statistical guarantee that sooner or later, most users will cave in and hit yes, even if by accident. iOS is an extreme example of this - when you say you don't want to upgrade, you are immediately prompted with a pin code request as if your device just locked itself, and your reflex is to punch in the pin to unlock it again. But if you read what it says at the bottom, it's asking for your pin to get permission to schedule the upgrade that you just said no to.
Whoever the designers are who came up with this stuff, fuck them. This shit is going to be in ethics textbooks in a decade or two. I hope someone from the facebook UX team is reading this, I hope they know their day job is to make the world a worse place.