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How Facebook and Other Sites Manipulate Your Privacy Choices

“Researchers call these design and wording decisions “dark patterns,” a term applied to UX that tries to manipulate your choices. When Instagram repeatedly nags you to “please turn on notifications,” and doesn’t present an option to decline? That’s a dark pattern. When LinkedIn shows you part of an InMail message in your email, but forces you to visit the platform to read more? Also a dark pattern. When Facebook redirects you to “log out” when you try to deactivate or delete your account? That’s a dark pattern too.”

Technology, BusinessHenry GoodmanOctober 26, 2020Digital, Tech, Social

TikTok is nothing new – to marketers, it’s just another ad platform

“We’ve lived through a decade of conference bullshit about reducing the duopoly’s grip on the digital advertising dollar through new ‘hard-hitting’ government policies or worthy (very temporary) advertiser bans. Both Google and Facebook have pretended to listen and learn but have actually just charged on regardless, with barely a blip in the respective EBITDAs. There was never any real potential to derail these two spectacular companies. If anything, the threat of sanction helped both platforms appear to be challenged when nothing could have been further from the truth.”

Business, Innovation, Product DevelopmentHenry GoodmanOctober 20, 2020Advertising, Digital, Marketing

Estonia, the Digital Republic

"It was during Kotka’s tenure that the e-Estonian goal reached its fruition. Today, citizens can vote from their laptops and challenge parking tickets from home. They do so through the “once only” policy, which dictates that no single piece of information should be entered twice. Instead of having to “prepare” a loan application, applicants have their data—income, debt, savings—pulled from elsewhere in the system. There’s nothing to fill out in doctors’ waiting rooms, because physicians can access their patients’ medical histories. Estonia’s system is keyed to a chip-I.D. card that reduces typically onerous, integrative processes—such as doing taxes—to quick work. “If a couple in love would like to marry, they still have to visit the government location and express their will,” Andrus Kaarelson, a director at the Estonian Information Systems Authority, says. But, apart from transfers of physical property, such as buying a house, all bureaucratic processes can be done online."