Description
In view of a safe and sound IPR & IT Management, the collaboration of IP/IT experts and business (design, product, sales, C-Level) teams is of great significance. Actually, this is becoming much more necessary and vital along with digital-related product design practices.
I don’t know if you have heard the term “dark pattern” but let me explain in reference to the article I found very insightful via https://lnkd.in/dZRGqFpB.
“A dark pattern is a user interface designed so that a consumer is manipulated into making choices that are in the business’s interests. For example, a pre-checked “accept all cookies” box or an extra item snuck into your checkout basket by default.”
In respect of this malpractice, “In December 2022, Fortnite-maker Epic Games reached a $520 million settlement with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) over a trifecta of data privacy no-no’s: data collection from minors, shady billing practices, and the bedrock of the suit—“dark patterns.”
“In Epic’s case, the “counterintuitive, inconsistent, and confusing button configuration” made it so users—primarily children under the age of 13—were racking up hundreds of in-game purchases without realizing it without parental consent, since payment information was already saved to their account, according to the FTC’s complaint.”
As you can imagine, this is an issue of UX/UI design that would have been prevented if product design team had ever collaborated with the legal team to comply with the requirements of data privacy law.
However, usually and unfortunately, this is not the case as confirmed and articulated by Jason Broughton, the chief design officer at LexisNexis, via the said article, by emphasizing on the fact that “There’s just not enough dialogue between product design and legal. There needs to be some sort of best practices in the industry for communication, some legal review [of design],” he added. “Coming from Silicon Valley, in product, there’s still this idea that legal is a blocker of innovation. Or it will create too much work. [Or] ‘these attorneys don’t get what we are doing. They’re not pro-business.’”
As you can see from above, consciously or unconsciously, companies operating beyond a conventional sense i.e. in digital-related product design practices, seems to be even more ignorant of the imparity of collaboration of legal and business teams to safeguard and balance their needs/rights and of their consumers.
