Читать книгу Security Engineering - Ross Anderson - Страница 84

This takes us from the theory to the practice. Deception often involves an abuse of the techniques developed by compliance professionals – those people whose job it is to get other people to do things. While a sales executive might dazzle you with an offer of a finance plan for a holiday apartment, a police officer might nudge you by their presence to drive more carefully, a park ranger might tell you to extinguish campfires carefully and not feed the bears, and a corporate lawyer might threaten you into taking down something from your website.

The behavioural economics pioneer and apostle of ‘nudge’, Dick Thaler, refers to the selfish use of behavioural economics as ‘sludge’ [1878]. But it's odd that economists ever thought that the altruistic use of such techniques would ever be more common than the selfish ones. Not only do marketers push the most profitable option rather than the best value, but they use every other available trick too. Stanford's Persuasive Technology Lab has been at the forefront of developing techniques to keep people addicted to their screens, and one of their alumni, ex-Googler Tristan Harris, has become a vocal critic. Sometimes dubbed ‘Silicon valley's conscience’, he explains how tech earns its money by manipulating not just defaults but choices, and asks how this can be done ethically [868]. Phones and other screens present menus and thus control choices, but there's more to it than that. Two techniques that screens have made mainstream are the casino's technique of using intermittent variable rewards to create addiction (we check our phones 150 times a day to see if someone has rewarded us with attention) and bottomless message feeds (to keep us consuming even when we aren't hungry any more). But there are many older techniques that predate computers.