Pointed out that Starbucks uses a ``dark pattern'' that intentionally deceives users

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It is stipulated by law in Europe and the United States that "in order to use the information of the user who visited the website for targeted advertising, the user must allow the use of cookies." As a result, there is an increasing number of “dark patterns” tricks used to trick users into choosing cookies that allow targeted advertising. Engineer Chris Corbett got impatient with the Starbucks website in the UK when he set users to disallow the use of cookies for advertising, resulting in unnecessarily long processing times. He notes that dark patterns can be seen that make users cancel settings. Starbucks and TrustArc add fake cookie processing delay if you don't click agree | Hacker Newshttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28500092by Corbett The point is Starbucks UK's website. The video below shows how the Starbucks UK website works with cookie settings.

Click "More Information" when asked about cookie usage on the Starbucks UK website.

Of the options, allow only the minimum use of cookies, and click "SUBMIT PREFERENCES" without allowing the use of cookies for advertisements.

The message "You have updated your cookie selection" is displayed. Nothing unusual happens at this point.

Next, delete the local storage.

It will also delete all previous cookies. By simply setting the cookie, the previously saved cookie will continue to be retained, but now all the cookie information saved on the user's PC, including information about Starbucks, will be lost.

On top of that, go to the cookie selection screen from "More Information" again.

As before, allow only the minimum number of cookies and click "SUBMIT PREFERENCES".

Then, the screen shows that the process is being processed, and loading that was not there before appeared.

When you think you've finally moved on to the next screen, you're back at the processing screen. Along with the words 'It may take a few minutes to reflect the settings', a 'CANCEL' button was displayed that allows you to return the cookie settings to a blank page at any time.

Corbett wrote to the Twitter accounts of two companies, Starbucks UK and TrustArc, which verifies its privacy, saying, ``You have to deal with 'status', except for unnecessary timeouts. No, this only happens in privacy settings, can you explain?"

Corbett points out that this is a dark pattern that deceives users. A dark pattern refers to an act that intentionally makes the design difficult to understand in order to force the user to take the intended action. It is said. With the enforcement of the EU's data protection regulation GDPR, it has become difficult to collect user data. increase. For this reason, the state of California in the United States has passed a law prohibiting dark patterns, and there are moves to establish a new law in each state that ``does not recognize consent obtained through dark patterns''. It's coming.

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You can read the machine translated English article here.