Semi-related, not exactly a dark pattern put a job I bailed on early in my career for ethical reasons.
I was hired to build a rudimentary tool for detecting nudity in images, over large datasets, as fast as possible/reasonable, with a pretty generous margin of error. The agreed pay was extremely good for the performance the client wanted.
Not long after I started, after getting an advance payment, one of the clients called me and very tactfully broke the news to me that what they actually wanted was a tool that would detect women in bikinis, or showing lots of skin, and that they would be crawling social media and photo sharing sites, and their 'service' was a private premium forum that included a section where members could trade pictures of girls they knew, and they wanted to add a gallery of girls who post bikini pictures, with their real names and locations and links to their socials.
I re-payed the advance that day, and it very much shaped my approach to consulting.
I was hired to build a rudimentary tool for detecting nudity in images, over large datasets, as fast as possible/reasonable, with a pretty generous margin of error. The agreed pay was extremely good for the performance the client wanted.
Not long after I started, after getting an advance payment, one of the clients called me and very tactfully broke the news to me that what they actually wanted was a tool that would detect women in bikinis, or showing lots of skin, and that they would be crawling social media and photo sharing sites, and their 'service' was a private premium forum that included a section where members could trade pictures of girls they knew, and they wanted to add a gallery of girls who post bikini pictures, with their real names and locations and links to their socials.
I re-payed the advance that day, and it very much shaped my approach to consulting.