Comment by flangola7
3 years ago
A/B testing is so gross. In other domains human experimentation of any kind, no matter how low risk, involves getting fully informed consent and ethics board approval before going ahead.
Experimental behavior manipulation, without even telling the subject they are part of a manipulation experiment? You would be chased out of the room and your reputation destroyed! Utterly unacceptable. But in webdev universe this is somehow seen as a totally normal practice.
This is exactly how users felt when Reddit ran A/B testing on their "feature" that forcibly signed out people on mobile browsers and said they needed to use the Reddit app to sign back in. I saw a crazy long thread of straight backlash about how messed up it was and how they aren't cattle to experiment on and how they didn't consent to that (which they prolly did in the T&C but no one reads that and actually understands what they're agreeing to).
Seeing as they were posting the backlash on Reddit, I'm guessing a lot of people downloaded the app to log in and Reddit said "Big Success!" when they checked the stats.
> which they prolly did in the T&C but no one reads that and actually understands what they're agreeing to
The GDPR's notion of informed consent really needs to be applied pervasively to all kinds of consumer contracts. If it's hidden in walls of text that the average user doesn't read it shouldn't count as consent.
I remember reading somewhere that if you actually read the TOS/EULA of every single thing you use, it would take your entire lifetime.