Playing the "Terms and Conditions Apply" game is like entering mental gymnastics, as it will challenge you to keep opting out in a variety of ways--but still familiar since it is what most sites do to us.
'Terms and Conditions Apply' Game: Gamifying Pop-ups
This online mini-game will squeeze your brain as you try to opt-out of every pop-up. The premise of the "Terms & Conditions Apply" game is that EVIL CORP wants your data, and they "will use every trick in the book (and a few more, just for fun)."
Your mission is to not accept any terms and conditions and decline any cookies dropped on you. You must say "no" to all notifications, and you must always opt-out of cookies. "You must never accept anything," the intro of the game tells you.
There are 29 questions all in all. One pop-up after the other will greet your screen, leaving once you click on your answer. This game takes around five minutes to play through, says FreeGamePlanet.
This game highlights the frustrating experience of trying to opt out of websites or apps asking you for "permission" to track you and target your ads across the web, according to Gizmodo. And frustrating it is.
The faceless EVIL CORP gets very creative with their pop-ups. Like they said in the beginning, EVIL CORP will use every trick in the book. Foreign languages and the ever-classic plead for help will try and lead you to opt-in to their terms and conditions. It gets frustrating and completely funny how absurd these pop-ups can get.
Other tricks are a little more sneaky, like pale font colors and misleading UI design. The "no" option can be buried in a series of drop-down menus that you can barely find in the time restraint or can only be toggled after a series of frustrating clicks. Word games and twisted meanings will also coax you into giving up your data.
You must stay alert, reading the pop-ups carefully. Read between the lines, check the pop-up up close, and decline those pop-ups before they expire and EVIL CORP "assumes" you choose to opt-in if you didn't click the button.
At the end of the game, it tells you how well you did to avoid giving up your precious personal data.
Dark Patterns
Although some of the questions in the pop-ups might be exaggerated, it still rings a bit of truth. The satirical approach of "Terms & Conditions Apply" pokes fun at the pop-ups, notifications, and cookies people have to agree to just surf the web. Some of the questions in the game, however, mimic the sort of dark patterns websites are caught using nowadays.
Because of these shady pop-ups coercing internet users into clicking the buttons these websites want, Consumer Reports, Electric Frontier Foundations, and tech advocates and policy researchers teamed up to develop the Dark Patterns Tip Line.
They rolled out the tip line to document unreasonably sticky UI found in the web, to "call out corporations for taking what's not theirs," Gizmodo reported.
You can share screenshots of any dark patterns to the tip line and help researchers and regulators to call out and regulate how websites design and release their pop-ups.
