Dark patterns in online shopping, in-store facial recognition, who really controls the Internet? Vertical Hold Ep 383

How do online businesses use “dark patterns” to control how we surf the web and spend our money? Should Aussie retail shops be allowed to track our faces as we walk through stores? How has the “open” Internet become a closed shop for just a few tech giants?
Special guests CPRC CEO Erin Turner and The Register’s Simon Sharwood!

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This week’s show has a distinct dark theme. Not that we’re protecting your eyeballs from too much glare.

Instead, we’re peering into the darker ways that the so-called “open” Internet might not be that big warm friendly place you always thought it was.

The Register’s Simon Sharwood joins us to discuss how the “open” highways of the Internet have rather rapidly become closed private roads owned by just a few big tech firms — and why this is such a big problem.

Even when you’re on those private roads, are you being steered in the wrong direction? We catch up with the CPRC’s Erin Turner to discuss how “dark patterns” in web design are selling Australian consumers short! So say you think, OK, I won’t shop online. It turns out you’re perhaps not that privately secure in-store either, with big Australian retail firms using facial recognition to track us in-store — and Erin’s got some insight into how that fits (or doesn’t) with privacy law as well!