Businesses can’t get anywhere without making their targeted consumers happy, and if you read on, you’ll find a list of effective tactics they deploy that you might not be too happy about.
These tactics are good for business because they manipulate you into doing what is good for them whilst striving to make you feel in control.
The visibility of these methods could stir conversations and thoughts that need to be conjured before our eternal (and sometimes reckless) chase of financial gain before inducing harm upon us.
Dark Patterns
Via Peggy McColl
Many businesses design dark patterns into their user interfaces to psychologically manipulate you into doing what’s best for them. Dark patterns conquer the digital world now and can be found on mobile applications, websites and software.
What you actually want to do is maneuver around it, even if it slightly hurts their profits. This can be observed in a big ‘Subscribe’ button overshadowing its neighboring ‘Remind me Later’ hyperlink, or a more sophisticated design created to make it seemingly impossible for you to delete your account or gain more control over your privacy.
If you try to delete your Amazon account, you might sensibly go to the homepage and click on the ‘Account’ drop-down, choose ‘Your Account’ and scroll all the way to the bottom but find nothing related to shutting it down. The only way to delete it is through scrolling to the bottom of the homepage, and under ‘Let Us Help You’ choose ‘Help’. You’re then taken to a page where you must select ‘Need More Help?’ and click on ‘Contact Us’ and ‘Prime or Something else’ consecutively. After that, in another drop-down bar titled ‘Tell us more about your issue’, you need to somehow figure out to choose ‘Login and security’, which in turn takes you to its own drop-down menu. Finally, you’ll find ‘Close my account’, but you can’t close it JUST yet.
You must first have a chat with an Amazon associate who will lecture you on why account deletion is not a good idea. And you still can’t delete the account yourself, they have to do it for you!
As an experiment, try to delete your Facebook account and discover for yourself the obviously intentional design keeping you from taking that action.
This specific type of dark pattern has been termed by Harry Brignull, a user-experience specialist, as a ‘Roach motel’: a design that makes it easy to get into a situation but hard to get out. Brignull coined the term ‘dark pattern’ back in 2010 and conceived a website to educate people about the issue.
Sadly, a darker side of these techniques has been fleshed out in a report published a couple of months ago by the Norwegian Consumer Council titled ‘Deceived by Design’. It details, based on user testing, how tech giants, Facebook and Google, adopt dark patterns to make it harder for us to opt for privacy-friendly options. These companies make a huge chunk of their revenues from personalized advertising. So, to them, knowing more about you makes more profits.
Personalized Advertising
Via Tumblr
The word ‘personalized’ makes the concept seem innocent. It feels like a service is being offered to us for free. But how does advertising become personalized? Through gathering as much information about you as possible. And corporations using their services are promised more clicks. So, everyone is happy, right? Wrong.
Fed largely by dark patterns, personalized advertising agencies like Google Ads do their best to know more about you. Your information is the crucial ingredient to their success.
Your location, everything you type into the search bar (even if you changed your mind and deleted it), what videos you watch and how much of them you watch, what you read, who you befriend and which of these friends are considered close; are just some of the information they input into their AI algorithms.
Facebook owns Instagram and WhatsApp. Google pushes you to use your g-mail to use their search engine, YouTube, g-mail and Google Plus. This makes it very difficult to escape their surveillance and keep track of what exactly they know about you. If that’s not enough reason to worry, just check your Google or Facebook Ad Settings and you will find that you have – by default – agreed to contribute your information to their personalized advertising services.
Astroturfing
Via New Stateman
Unlike previously mentioned manipulative tactics, astroturfing allows corporations to push their marketing and public relations campaigns whilst hiding behind the curtain.
Astroturfs are the artificial grass surfaces you see covering sports fields. When corporations hide behind fake grass-roots movements to deliver their messages and reach their ends, it is called astroturfing.
10 years ago, for example, McDonald’s admitted to paying 1,000 part-time employees to line up for the release of their Quarter Pounder in Osaka, Japan. But that’s a mild example. In the 2010 Australian Federal Election, Philip Morris created the ‘Alliance of Australian Retailers’ to fight a proposed piece of legislation that would impose “plain cigarette packaging” had it passed.
After they have run out of tricks to manipulate you, astroturfing allows corporations to remain influential through seemingly more authentic individuals, movements and organizations that exist only to serve their purposes.
Egypt is by no means devoid of such a common practice. So, can you think of an example of astroturfing in Egypt? I bet you can.
