One of Facebook's recent data grabs in Europe also underlines how it's using dark patterns on its platform to attempt to normalize increasingly privacy hostile technologies.
It's likely the company used the aforementioned variations in wording to determine — via an A/B testing process — which consent screens were most successful at convincing people to accept the highly privacy-hostile technology.
Given that Facebook's facial recognition feature has been switched off in Europe since 2012 "the setting is on" message would presumably have only been sent to users in the US or Canada — where Facebook has been able to forge ahead with pushing people to accept the controversial, privacy-hostile technology, embedding it into features such as auto-tagging for photo uploads.
(See this blog for other examples of consumer-hostile technology "advances").
Action: Use tracker blockers Who is this for: Everyone — except people who like being ad-stalked online How difficult is it: Mild effort Tell me more: Trackers refers to a whole category of privacy-hostile technologies designed to follow and record what web users are doing as they move from site to site, and even across different devices.
Germany has been hostile to technology, says Ludolf von Wartenberg, managing director of the BDI, Germany's Industry Federation, and has missed out, for example, on both green (agricultural) and red (medical) biotechnologies.
To use the term for someone who ignores Twitter or refuses to move from analogue to digital TV is a complete misrepresentation, says Griffin. "We use it for people who are hostile to technology, who don't want to get a mobile phone," she says.
Since then, as he explained in an interview with Francis Fukuyama, "an ossified, Weberian bureaucracy and the increasingly hostile regulation of technology" have crippled government's capacity to foster technological innovation.
The two web hotshots faced a tightly knit community, potentially hostile to newfangled technology.
Although some Liberal Democrat ministers are reported to be open to the prospect of relaxing the rules on GM food, the party's grassroots has previously been hostile to the technology.
