In 2010, the Electronic Frontier Foundation was fed up with Facebook’s pushy interface. The platform had a way of coercing people into giving up more and more of their privacy. The question was, what to call that coercion? Zuckermining? Facebaiting? Was it a Zuckerpunch? The name that eventually stuck: Privacy Zuckering, or when “you are tricked into publicly sharing more information about yourself than you really intended to.”
A decade later, Facebook has weathered enough scandals to know that people care about those manipulations; last year, it even paid a $5 billion fine for making “deceptive claims about consumers’ ability to control the privacy of their personal data.” And yet researchers have found that Privacy Zuckering and other shady tactics remain alive and well online. They’re especially rampant on social media, where managing your privacy is, in some ways, more confusing than ever.
Here’s an example: A recent Twitter pop-up told users “You’re in control,” before inviting them to “turn on personalized ads” to “improve which ones you see” on the platform. Don’t want targeted ads while doomscrolling? Fine. You can “keep less relevant ads.” Language like that makes Twitter sound like a sore loser.
Actually, it’s an old trick. Facebook used it back in 2010 when it let users opt out of Facebook partner websites collecting and logging their publicly available Facebook information. Anyone who declined that “personalization” saw a pop-up that asked, “Are you sure? Allowing instant personalization will give you a richer experience as you browse the web.” Until recently, Facebook also cautioned people against opting out of its facial-recognition features: “If you keep face recognition turned off, we won’t be able to use this technology if a stranger uses your photo to impersonate you.” The button to turn the setting on is bright and blue; the button to keep it off is a less eye-catching grey.