Are you familiar with the term dark patterns? You probably are if you do any online shopping. The term has been in use in the UX world for a decade and refers to a design choice that makes a user decide on something that they might not have otherwise chosen, such as adding a product to a shopping cart that wasn’t selected, running a deal countdown clock, or warning that a product you are thinking about buying is running low in inventory. These are also called nudging, where the website designer places the preferred answer in larger font or bigger icons such as the image below.

Last fall a group of academic researchers found more than 1,800 instances of dark pattern usage on 1,254 websites, which likely represents a low estimate. Many of these websites had pretty deceptive practices.

Dark patterns are just the latest salvo in the attempt to keep our privacy private. An article posted over the weekend in the New York Times documents the decline of this notion. “We have imagined that we can choose our degree of privacy with an individual calculation in which a bit of personal information is traded for valued services — a reasonable quid pro quo,” writes the author, Shoshana Zuboff. “We thought that we search Google, but now we understand that Google searches us. We assumed that we use social media to connect, but we learned that connection is how social media uses us.” Our digital privacy is now very much a publicly traded service. Zuboff’s study of this erosion of privacy is just in time to honor this year’s Data Privacy Day. She mentions a series of examples, such as Delta Airlines’ use of facial recognition software at several airports to shave seconds off of passenger boarding times, with almost everyone opting in without nary a complaint.

The other news item in time for DPD is the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) recent publication of a series of design guidelines called Age Appropriate Design Code to help children’s privacy and online safety. Let’s discuss what they are trying to do, what some of the issues are with enforcing their guidelines, and what this all has to do with dark patterns.

The ICO rules haven’t yet been adopted by Parliament – that is several months away if all goes well, and longer if it turns into another Brexit debacle. And that is the crux of the problem: “Companies are notoriously bad at self-regulating these things. Guidance is great, but if it’s not mandatory, it doesn’t mean much’” says my go-to UX expert, Danielle Cooley. And Techcrunch likens this to the ICO saying, “Are you feeling lucky data punk? How comprehensive the touted ‘child protections’ will end up being remains to be seen.”

Cooley gives the ICO props for moving things along – which is more than we can say for any US-based organization. “It is a step in the right direction and a good starting point for other government entities, much like GDPR was for motivating California to pass their own privacy legislation. However, there is really no way to enforce much of this and there are multiple ways around it too.” She gives the example of American alcohol manufacturers that prohibit people under 21 from entering their websites. Can they really stop a minor from clicking through the age screen? Not really. “At least, the ICO addresses dark patterns and nudging.” One point Cooley makes is proving the opposite of dark patterns is a lot harder to do, and few analysts have done any research.

The ICO has specific examples of nudging, which “could encourage children to provide more personal data than they would otherwise volunteer.” There is a total of 15 different categories of guidelines, ranging from transparency, dealing with default setting and data sharing, and parental controls. The rules are for all children under the age of 18, which is a wider scope than existing UK and US data protection laws that generally stop at age 13. It is extensive and mostly well thought out and applies to a wide collection of online services, including gaming, social media platforms and streaming services as well as ecommerce sites.

Another plus for the ICO rules is how it adopts a risk-based approach to ensure that the rules are effectively applied. However, while that sounds good in theory, it might prove difficult in practice. For example, let’s say you want to verify the age of a website visitor. Do you have one version of your site for really young kids, while another for teens? Exactly how can you implement this? I don’t know either.

Naturally, the tech industry is not happy with this effort, saying they were too onerous, vague and broad. Like GDPR, they apply to every online business, regardless of whether they are based in the UK or elsewhere. The industry reps do have something of a point. What is interesting about the ICO rules is how it places the best interest of children above the bottom lines of the tech vendors and site operators. That is going to be hard to pull off, even if the rules are passed into law and the threat of fines (four percent of total annual worldwide revenue) are levied.

The UK tech policy expert Heather Burns wrote an extensive critique of the ICO draft rules last summer (while there have been some changes with the final draft, most of her issues remain relevant), calling it “one of the worst proposals on internet legislation I’ve ever seen.” The draft proposed a catch-22 situation: to find out if kids are accessing a service, administrators would be required to collect personally identifiable data about all users and site usage, precisely the sort of thing that the ICO, as a privacy regulator, should be dissuading companies from doing. Another issue is that the ICO rules, which were written to target U.S. social media giants, could be onerous for UK domestic startups and SMEs, at a time when many are considering their post-Brexit options. “If the goal of the draft code is to trigger an exodus of tech businesses and investment, it will succeed,” she writes. Additionally, no economic impact assessment of the proposals, as is required for UK legislation, was conducted.

Her section-by-section analysis is well worth studying. For example, she wrote that the draft proposal associated “the use of location data with abduction, physical and mental abuse, sexual abuse and trafficking. This hysteria could lead to young adults being infantilised under rules prepared for toddlers; rules which could, for example, ban them from being able to use a car share app to get home because it uses geolocation data.”

Only time will tell whether the ICO rules are helpful or hurting things. And in the meantime, think about how you can do something today that will help your overall data privacy for the rest of the year. Ideally, you should celebrate your data privacy 24/7.Instead, we seem to note its diminishment, year after year.

I am a big patron of museums. I go to many of them and try to fit in a visit whenever I am out of town. But what I have seen lately is how they have begun to use the same technologies that entertainment companies have been perfecting for movies and theme park rides, all in the interest of capturing more visitors and increasing visitor engagement. I think this a positive development, and this blog explains its evolution and why it is welcomed.

I have written about this trend before: once for the NY Times when I visited the Lincoln museum in Springfield Ill. back in 2008, and once for HPE’s blog posted two years ago. In those posts, I talk about how the best museum designers combine exhibits involving non-visual senses (not just reading some text plastered on the wall) and using technologies such as RFID and touchscreens to personalize the visit. (I’ll talk about these in a moment.)

You might call this when museums become theme parks. And while this isn’t quite as dire as this might sound, it does show how hard museums have to work to gain notice in this Snapchat world where attentions can shift in a matter of seconds. It also shows how the technology developed for the theme parks (including higher-definition video, complex theatrical control systems and the like) can be deployed in ways to improve learning and make the visits more memorable. These technologies can also help those of us that want to learn more and take a deeper dive into what is being shown in the museum.

I got a preview of the latest example with a new aquarium here in St. Louis that will open next week. The aquarium is part of a major redevelopment of our Union Station, a building that hasn’t seen any scheduled passenger service for many decades and is more than 100 years old. When I moved here more than ten years ago, the building contained a shop-worn mall that had lost its luster. Then a few years ago it began to be redeveloped by its current owner, Lodging Hospitality Management (LHM). That company continued its adaptive reuse with various entertainment improvements: besides the aquarium, there is a Ferris Wheel, new restaurants and an indoor ropes course.

But just saying we have a new aquarium isn’t really doing the place justice. It is probably the most technologically advanced aquarium that I have seen. Its use of technology is done so elegantly that you may not really notice it as you drag your brood through the place, looking at the tanks and the sea life. A preview of what you can see in its tanks is linked here. (There is also this story on a local TV station here.) Let’s stop in and see what is going on.

First is using the latest high-def video in interesting ways. When you first enter the complex, you are in a soaring grand lobby that appears to be sitting at the bottom of a tank, as waves of water wash over you. The wall you are facing has loads of gears and a huge analog clock face, which plays off on that you are located inside a former train station. You then realize that you are looking at various video screens, and some very nice ones at that. The screens are delivering twice 4k resolution. That grabbed my attention. According to Andrew Schumacher, the main architectural designer at PGAV Destinations that lead the project, they spec’ed out the lobby ceiling with projection video three years ago when they first began. “But then LED technology became a better solution, so we made that change.” It is certainly stunning.

PGAV Destinations is based in St. Louis and has been designing various attractions for more than 50 years. They have created exhibits for the Atlanta Aquarium, including building a new shark tank for them. They were excited about creating an entire aquarium from scratch, and were challenged by LHM to incorporate technology in interesting pedagogical ways that combined both “high tech and high touch,” according to Schumacher. I think they have succeeded quite well. When you think about their design challenge, they have to meet three different goals:

• First, the animal or fish has to be comfortable in its habitat.
• Second, the keepers have to be able to do their jobs, feed the critters, and maintain the tanks.
• Finally, the guests have to have something interesting to see.

Balancing these three goals isn’t easy, and given that each animal is unique and that the aquarium has more than 13,000 different “residents,” that adds to the complexity. And the trick is making sure that in the future we still have all of these residents alive and well.

But it isn’t just having tech for tech’s sake. The designers wanted to “bring the visitor into the story, something we learned from Disney and other theme parks,” said Ben Davis, the CTO of MoonDog Animation Studio in Charleston SC. This means you have to craft a compelling story from the moment you purchase your ticket to when you inevitably exit through the gift shop. I think they have succeeded. MoonDog designed the stories that are used throughout the aquarium, something they have done for other cultural institutions. “We were trying to get the aquarium to talk back to you, to bring you an emotional experience and keep you in a state of awe,” he told me. I agree completely. This isn’t your grandfather’s fish tank.

Once we leave the lobby, we then move into what appears to be a mockup of a train car. Instead of the windows on the sides and ceiling of the car, you have additional video screens that take you on the start of your journey to the wonders of the rivers and oceans around you. Once you exit the train car, there are six different major galleries to explore that are defined by various ecosystems, including one that covers the nearby confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers.

Smart Monkey’s ISAAC show control system runs the screens in this and other areas at the aquarium. You can see this company’s work to operate the media installations such as at the Bradley LAX international terminal (shown here) and at numerous museums around the world, including the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, the US Mint in Philadelphia, and exhibits at the Kennedy Space Center. This makes it easy to coordinate and operate all the various digital media and to program some very sophisticated special effects.

The ISAAC system at the aquarium is running seven VMs and contains all the digital media assets for the place, along with housing a scheduling system and various databases and workspaces. The key, as explained to me by their director of technology Mitch Schuh, is to enable the graphic and exhibit designers to have tools to make it easier to realize their vision, without having to worry about the underlying networks, servers and other infrastructure. The system also has an active-active failover, in case one system goes down. All of this can be managed remotely via a web portal too, so the aquarium systems can be operated anywhere in the world. “I can think of several cases during the construction of the exhibits where we were able to make quick decisions and adjust show runtimes and make other changes on the fly,” said Schuh. “These would have taken a lot more time and effort without Isaac.”

Besides all the HD TVs, there are also touchscreen kiosks. They are popping up at many museums. The aquarium has them sprinkled throughout its galleries, and they are set in an attractive steampunk-like setup. Why steampunk? This is because the designers wanted to evoke what early 1900s-era train travel was like, paying homage to the early days of the station. These screens can provide a simulated 3D display of the sea life you are looking at, along with a map showing you where you are located and other data such as diet and habitat that can help amplify your visit and provide more context about what you are seeing in the tanks. They are also used to support a personalized game designed for kids visiting the museum. (More on that in a moment.)

Second is its use of music and sound and lighting effects. In my walkthrough I met Michael Gleason, the head composer, who told me that he had written more than 75 minutes of music that will play in different galleries and for different situations. That is more than many feature films have and is indicative of the sensory experience they are aiming towards. But it isn’t just the sound effects, but its combination with theatrical lighting too. I first saw this in the Lincoln museum, but the lighting is used in our aquarium in more clever ways to amplify the music you are hearing and what is swimming in the tanks in front of you. These digital assets are part of what the Isaac show control systems are managing.

Next is animation along with virtual/augmented reality. One of the exhibits is the three otters that live there, and of course they are named Thatcher, Sawyer and Finn. There is another animated one called Tommy that you can interact with is manipulated via computers. This was created by the folks at Groove Jones.  Tommy is next to the same gallery where you can see the real ones swimming around. The human operator has cameras to judge the audience response and answer their live questions. Like the Wizard of Oz, the operator is manipulating the controls in a hidden booth. There is also a sandbar touch tank that has a layer of projected video on it, making it more enticing and interactive for the visitors. The goal here is to engage the visitor and have them literally get their hands wet exploring the life aquatic.

Personalization is also a big plus. When I visited the Chopin museum in Warsaw, we got a RFID tag that would allow us to hear the content in our language of choice, along with further personalization depending on our age and musical sophistication. Museums are getting smarter about making these visits more personal. A good example of this can be found at Atlanta’s College Football Hall of Fame. When you purchase your ticket, you get a lanyard with an RFID chip that is set to a particular team and player. As you move around the museum, you see statistics that are filtered which are relevant to that player. At the aquarium, children get RFID cards that are age-matched and allow them to participate in a scavenger hunt and knowledge quizzes with results that get posted to their profiles.

Sometimes the personalization doesn’t have to be too high-tech: if you visit one of the Titanic Museums in either Branson or Vegas you will be given a random paper “passport” to allow you to assume the identity of one of the passengers. You get to find out where that passenger lived aboard the ship and whether they survived the accident.

We have come a long way since museums started using AcoustiGuide technology to play recordings of their curators explain their collections to us. MoonDog’s Davis sees one way to make this tech more location-sensitive, to further increase personalization and as a way that it could be driven by an ISAAC or other show-control system. He sees that movie producers and museum curators are converging, so that visitors can create their own stories with their visits.

There is a fine line between putting so much sensory information in a museum that it can overwhelm and defeat its purpose of improving the visitor’s experience. You do want to leave time for visitors to think about what they are seeing and hearing and feeling. While I am excited to see these other, non-visual, elements appear, I do understand that you need to integrate them carefully and ensure that you aren’t becoming a theme park version of the museum. I welcome your own thoughts about this. Please share other examples of museums or places that you have been that have resonated with you in the comments.

If you are supporting an elderly member of your family, you might be interested in a collection of home tech devices that can help extend their ability to live more independently. We all need help as we get older, and I write this column based on the experience of my family and caring for my 95 year-old mother-in-law.

She has been living independently for the past 18 months using these three technologies:

• Hero automated pill dispenser (It now costs at least $30 per month with a $100 initial purchase and 12-month commitment. There are other plans that cost more and provide additional monitoring and support.)
• BlipCare BP blood pressure monitor (We bought it on Amazon for $159, although it currently is no longer being sold there.)
• And an Amazon Alexa Show 5 ($89) or 8 (for $129) (These are list prices and are discounted heavily for various promotions.)

The three devices allow us to ensure we can reliably dispense her meds, take her blood pressure, and talk to her when we aren’t able to visit. I’ll explain the limitations and decisions behind each piece of technology. When we brought all this gear into the facility, the medical staff was impressed and also unfamiliar with each of them, which motivated my purpose in writing this column. Note that my mother-in-law lives independently in an eldercare facility, although step-up care is available in other parts of her building. This is a common arrangement.

Each device works with its own smartphone app to setup, but not to use: that is an important distinction as my mother-in-law doesn’t have a smartphone. They also all require decent Wifi service in her room, which could be an issue in some facilities. (This means that you should test the signal strength in your family member’s room ahead of time.) All three units sit nestled together on her desk, which is also important, and I will get to why in a moment.

The Alexa Show is a voice-activated home hub device, similar to what Google and Apple sell with one difference: it has a very simple video conferencing setup. The video screen (either five or eight inches on the diagonal) is critical, because it allows us to “drop in” on her and have a video chat, see what she is doing. This is critical during the pill-taking and blood pressure processes, which is why all three devices are near each other on her desk, and also used to contact her in case we can’t reach her on her cell phone. And it helps that the Alexa show is very simple to use. You do need a smartphone app to make the call. A second benefit of the Alexa-brand of devices is that they have a better event notification process. That is useful for verbal reminders of daily events. Other home hubs, such as from Apple or Google, aren’t as convenient or as capable in this regard.  (Also, Facebook has its Portal, but I haven’t tried it out yet.) BTW, we have had mixed success with her giving Alexa voice commands. You might want to try out one of these devices in your own home with your elderly family member and see how it goes.

The Blipcare device is a bit quirky to setup. It uses its own web server and has alarmingly lax security, but what is nice is that you don’t need anything else to record her blood pressure once you get it working. Results are automatically posted within a few minutes to a special dashboard webpage that family members can check periodically and also share with doctors. If you have two family members to care for, it can track their stats separately.

Finally, the Hero device is used to dispense her pills. It needs to be periodically loaded with them, of course, but it is basically very simple to use: my mother-in-law just presses a button, and the pills drop down into a cup, similar to how a soda machine dispenses its product.  You set up a schedule and which pills get dispensed when.

The notion of having these three devices is to postpone having nursing care or other options for my mother-in-law. While these devices aren’t cheap, using them for several months can have a big payback given what the step-up nursing care charges would be. And they also offer a sense of security for our family. While for our situation the devices involve us in her care, your own family situation might not make this possible or desirable. And like any home tech, you have to be prepared to do some tech support to handle problems.

BTW, I have been using a different device to monitor my own blood pressure, the Qardio Arm ($99). It requires a bluetooth connection to a smartphone to post its results and is somewhat difficult for an elderly person to put over their arm and get it aligned in just the right spot for accurate measurements. I have been using one for many years. And although have had to replace two of the devices, the company quite willingly sent me these replacements at no charge.

Feel free to share your own eldercare tech solutions here.