Dark Pattern: Opt-in above the fold, but opt-out below the fold

Raymond

One of my colleagues reminded me of a Dark Pattern employed by the installer for the media player for that internet protocol that got the rug pulled out from under it.

When you got to the shovelware portion of the installer, it showed you this:

You see that everything is unchecked, so you click Next.

You have fallen into the trap.

Look at that scroll bar on the right hand side. It’s scrolled only partway through the list. And if you had scrolled down the list, you would have seen this:

That’s right. All the items you could see without scrolling were unchecked by default, but everything else was checked by default.

As my colleague noted, “This may be one of the few times where it cost more to be placed below the fold.”

Bonus reading: One of the pieces of bundled software was an app that wants to crash.

Raymond Chen

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