Security by Design

TL;DR: In supermarkets, food manufacturers fight – even pay – to get the best locations for their products: at eye level, or at the ends of aisles, where they better attract the attention of questing shoppers and therefore are more likely to be bought.

Abstract: In supermarkets, food manufacturers fight – even pay – to get the best locations for their products: at eye level, or at the ends of aisles, where they better attract the attention of questing shoppers and therefore are more likely to be bought. In software, designers have long known that most users do not change default settings. This is most easily seen in disputes about whether default privacy settings should opt users in or out. In 2008, the popular book Nudge, written by Richard R. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, focused mainstream attention on the years of this type of research, and dubbed the design of systems to nudge people toward particular behaviours that benefit both them and society in general “choice architecture” and the designers who make these apparently tiny but vastly influential decisions “choice architects”.