How Facebook and Other Sites Manipulate Your Privacy Choices

In 2010, the Electronic Frontier Foundation was fed up with Facebook’s pushy interface. The name that eventually stuck: Privacy Zuckering, or when “you are tricked into publicly sharing more information about yourself than you really intended to.” A decade later, Facebook has weathered enough scandals to know that people care about those manipulations; last year, it even paid a $5 billion fine for making “deceptive claims about consumers’ ability to control the privacy of their personal data.” And yet researchers have found that Privacy Zuckering and other shady tactics remain alive and well online. Here’s an example: A recent Twitter pop-up told users “You’re in control,” before inviting them to “turn on personalized ads” to “improve which ones you see” on the platform. Allowing instant personalization will give you a richer experience as you browse the web.” Until recently, Facebook also cautioned people against opting out of its facial-recognition features: “If you keep face recognition turned off, we won’t be able to use this technology if a stranger uses your photo to impersonate you.” The button to turn the setting on is bright and blue; the button to keep it off is a less eye-catching grey. But, says says Colin Gray, a human-computer interaction researcher at Purdue University, they’re particularly insidious “when you’re deciding what privacy rights to give away, what data you’re willing to part with.” Gray has been studying dark patterns since 2015.