Are Google and Facebook misleading European users into sharing more of their personal data than they think?
According to a new consumer advocacy report from the Norwegian Consumer Council, they most certainly are.
The NCC dropped a 44-page report on Wednesday detailing how three of the world’s biggest tech companies are “nudging” their users through “dark patterns” of user interface designs and carefully crafted wording to agree to privacy settings that share their personal data that the GDPR was setup to protect.
“Dark patterns” are designs and user interfaces that are specifically crafted to trick users into buying, signing up, or taking some other action they did not intend to. The NCC report, titled “Deceived By Design,” explains just how these dark patterns are being implemented by internet companies.
In one example, Facebook users looking to opt-out of a facial recognition feature are met with a prompt warning telling them that they “won’t be able to use this technology if a stranger uses your photo to impersonate you.” In this instance, Facebook has carefully formulated its wording to provide a negative result to your data privacy choice instead of giving their users even a neutral proposition. The report specifically makes the accusation that “Facebook, Google, and Windows 10 have design, symbols, and wording that nudge users away from the privacy-friendly choices.”
Facebook and Google are also accused in the report of providing nothing more than the the “illusion of control” through various methods such as “hiding away privacy-friendly choices, take-it-or-leave-it choices, and choice architectures where choosing the privacy friendly option requires more effort for the users.”
The NCC report goes on to call the “practice of misleading consumers into making certain choices, which may put their privacy at risk,” both unethical and exploitative. The council found that the worst practices came from Google and Facebook, and Microsoft’s Windows 10 used them to a lesser extent.