Essay
THE POWER OF DEFAULT
Illustration by Kym WintersIf the internet age has delivered us one thing, it is
convenience. We can now communicate in minutes
via email, as opposed to days via mail. We can find the
answer to almost any question in a few taps versus
spending hours in the librar y. And when we want to buy
something, we no longer have to venture outside to visit
separate stores; we now shop online and receive our
purchases in the comfort of our own homes (sometimes
the same day).
There has been a recent swell in commentary
suggesting the digital revolution has not turned out to
be a productivity booster as predicted. While the point
may be debated, it’s apparent that the inter net, especial ly
the mobile internet, has driven a new standard of
convenience in our lives. As a result, the principles that
guide engineers and product designers are now firmly
focused on making things as easy as possible.
However, when products have complex settings with
nuanced implications, convenience becomes less
obvious. In response, technology companies have
gravitated towards building default settings that
nominally make life simpler for users. But simple doesn’t
always mean safe. To be less kind, the addiction to
conven ience has made it easier to set defaults that benefit
technology companies more than users. Witness the
Byzantine layers of Facebook’s privacy settings with
their Orwellian default states.
Not only do most people not read terms and conditions
and privacy policies with a lawyer’s sceptical eye, they
also don’t tend to adjust (or even look at) their default
settings. A century ago, signing a contract would have
been a rare occurrence for the majority of people – now
m i l l ions of us do it e ver y day w ith a tap or t wo. T he Mag na
Carta was signed on a table in a meadow in front of 25
barons and knights; now we could DocuSign it up and
send it around in seconds, if only K ing John had email...
But with convenience comes complacency. So we tend
to leave defaults as, well, defaults. Bloatware apps sit
forever on our mobile home screens, search engines stay
on the original setting and privacy settings gather digital
dust. Further, social media apps are allowed to harvest
our private information and monetise it precisely because
we do not consider – much less explore – the default
options preset on our accounts. Users may be horrified
to learn that private emails and messages are routinely
read and leveraged by tech giants but they tend not to
blame themselves for sleepwalking into it by accepting
the default settings. We put the responsibility and agency
on the companies themselves not to be evil but actual
events have proven that trust to be misplaced.
Historically, when people have been led into giving up
something that is valuable to them for the sake of
conven ience, the y have of ten come to the real isation (or
eventually been alerted) that they are being takenINDUSTRY INSIGHTDjamel Agaoua, CEO of Rakuten Viber, investigates the power of
the humble default setting and how it literally controls our
actions – for better and for worse