Separately, some UI's make it very hard to tell which side is selected. It's a rare problem, but especially anxiety-inducing for me when it does appear.
It's also a stupid pattern. Privacy and spam laws usually require informed consent. They might as well just not ask for anything, because any consent they get this way doesn't count for shit.
This can be used as a dark pattern. If you want a user to use a particular setting (e.g. “Customize my ad experience.”) you can just make it unclear which they’re choosing.
are you using anxiety with a bit of hyperbole here, or is it really making you anxious? I can see it being confusing and needing extra time to really look at it rather than being instantly obvious, but it's nothing to cause stress. It's just a setting/option. It's not going to cause significant issues if misinterpreted. You can just set it the other way, and do it again.
Is this the same thing that separates those that like to mash all the buttons and twist all the knobs to see what happens vs those that don't want to touch anything because they don't know what will happen?
The worst offender to me is the ambiguous ui around creating a teams meeting for meetings created through whatever we are calling the outlook web thing these days. You don’t find out if you did it right until you have sent an email to your attendees with an erroneous teams link. And yes that is anxiety provoking.
Of course part of what makes it ambiguous is that there is a setting somewhere completely different which when set will add a teams link whether the slider is set or not.
> are you using anxiety with a bit of hyperbole here, or is it really making you anxious?
Depends on the setting. Sometimes they're for things that have greater than usual effects, like getting locked into a subscription payment or agreeing to additional charges for Spirit Airline flights. Other times they're for things that I have difficulty taking the initiative to address, like notification/unsubscribe settings, for which my ADHD only allows me occasional "windows" of time where I'm able to initiate or follow-through on changing the settings.
Sometimes it doesn't really matter and I just scoff at the bad UI and it's not a problem.
This is absolutely a dark pattern.