In setting defaults, you’re always making a choice.

“By default, all drivers will not be marked as organ donors.” vs “By default, all drivers will be marked as organ donors.”

“By default, all employees at companies with 401(k)s will save X% of their eligible salary in 401(k)s.”

You’re making a choice for them in any event.

I agree with you but we also need to be careful given how powerful defaults are. Even Thaler has, I believe, argued against organ donation being opt out; rather I think he's argued for requiring a yes/no choice when driver's licenses are renewed. (The argument is opt out would lead to next of kin/families arguing that the deceased never made a choice to donate.)

Ad companies argued this when Microsoft updated IE (or was it Edge?) to set the DNT flag to “1” by default.

I think they were right to argue as such, and wonder if MS knew that defaulting DNT to on would poison the well like that.

It’s a good argument. When people argue over what a default should be, they often don’t realize that it’s possible to have no default at all, and force an explicit choice.

If you require customers to make dozens of choices because you’re not willing to make some sensible default choices, some of them will make the choice to use another browser.

I’m not a Microsoft cheerleader (nor detractor) in general, but in this case, I’m glad they took a position and chose a default on behalf of their customers.

Unfortunately (and predictably) it backfired though. If it no longer represents a conscious user choice, DNT can be pretty safely ignored by Google and the likes.

Just FYI, govt. dark patterns in the US have been around for a very long time. For example, you could read about the "literacy" tests for voting in Southern states. Robert Caro has a nice description in Master of the Senate, vol. 2 of his LBJ biography.

EDIT: (From Caro) Questions on these tests posed to Black people in Alabama have included: "Give the names of all sixty-seven county judges in the state", "State the date when Oklahoma was admitted to the Union", and "How many bubbles there are in a bar of soap".

There are positives to the default being opt in, e.g. organ donor.

There could be negatives of course, there is no substitute for an informed citizenry and indepedent media to challenge such instances.