Emilia Rybak just wanted to register to vote.
Last fall, Rybak was changing her residency from New York to Florida, and the first step in the long slog of forms and paperwork was a seemingly easy one: the United States Postal Service’s Movers Guide website.
Like tens of millions of Americans each year, Rybak navigated to the site, filled out a simple form with her old and new addresses, paid the $1.25 identity verification fee, and then checked a box indicating that she also wanted to update her voter registration.
“ I was like, this is definitely the kind of thing that I'm gonna put off or forget about until it's voting time and I'm gonna be scrambling to do it,” Rybak says. “This is a perfectly timed option. And why not just do it now through the USPS?”
But when Rybak, who runs a user behavior research consultancy, clicked a button to continue updating her voter registration, she didn’t see anything about voting. Instead, she was redirected to a new website, with the USPS logo in the bottom corner, that forced her to click on a series of unskippable advertisements. “You don’t have to be a [user experience] professional to go through this flow and see that it’s highly unethical,” Rybak says.
For more than 30 years, one company, now called MyMove, has held an exclusive contract to run USPS’s change-of-address and voter registration service. The government doesn’t spend a dime on it. Instead, advertisers pay MyMove for the privilege of stuffing movers’ mailboxes and inboxes with spam—or deals, depending on your perspective—and MyMove splits the profits with USPS. Or at least, they’re supposed to.
This public-private partnership, born when the internet was still fetal, was once hailed by then vice president Al Gore as a shining example of government innovation. But it has morphed into a government-sanctioned pitfall that, experts and users allege, employs deceptive and potentially illegal design practices. These techniques, which experts often refer to as “dark patterns,” block users from completing their intended goals and manipulate them into clicking buttons, giving away personal information and entering into agreements they don’t want.
The MyMove-USPS partnership has persisted despite MyMove and its parent company, Red Ventures, paying $2.75 million in 2023 to settle a whistleblower allegation that they defrauded the USPS. (There was no determination of liability as a result of the settlement.) And the most frustrating aspects of the voter registration website have remained for years, despite a steady stream of online user reviews that claim MyMove is “a middle-man scam made to steal your info,” “useless enshitification of USPS,” and “one of the worst experiences I have come across. It’s straight up predatory.”
Rybak, who filed a complaint with the USPS Inspector General after her attempt to register to vote, documented her experience in screenshots and notes. WIRED reviewed a similar, although not identical, workflow when independently completing the MyMove voter registration process.
“MyMove is employing a pretty egregious cocktail of dark patterns,” says Lior Strahilevitz, a University of Chicago Law School professor, whose research has shown that aggressive dark patterns can quadruple the rate at which customers sign up for services they don’t actually want. “It’s not the worst I’ve ever seen, but an entity that’s partnering with the federal government shouldn’t be using so many manipulative sales tactics and compromising citizen privacy in that way.”
A former high-ranking official with the Federal Trade Commission, who requested anonymity because their current employer hadn’t authorized them to speak on the matter, described MyMove’s website as “deeply problematic” and had concerns about whether the current user interface might put the company at risk for regulatory action.
“It’s inherently confusing the way they’re presenting the choices—and it’s easily fixable, but there’s a lot of money at stake here,” the former regulator says.
In a statement, USPS noted that it processes 24 million change-of-address requests every year and that movers have alternative options, besides the MyMove website, to record their new address and register to vote. The agency said it is “aware of some customer discontent with the MyMove website. We take customer feedback seriously, and we are actively working with MyMove to increase transparency and enhance the customer experience.”
Stuck in the Flow
Immediately after completing her change-of-address form on the official USPS website, Rybak was shown a screen that said, “Next, begin updating your Voter Registration.” The page provided a checkbox Rybak could click to pre-populate the voter registration form with the information she’d just provided USPS. In small, light gray text next to the checkbox, a disclaimer warned that by clicking the box Rybak agreed that a copy of her personal contact information would be transferred to MyMove. In small text at the bottom of the page, another disclaimer warned that once she was redirected to MyMove, she would be subject to MyMove’s privacy policies and terms and conditions, not USPS’s.
When she clicked continue and arrived at the MyMove website, Rybak didn’t see anything about registering to vote. The first page she encountered said, “Next, set up your internet in minutes.” The only available buttons were labeled “Keep my current service,” “Set up new service,” or “Get Deals.”
Rybak didn’t want to click any of them, but she chose what seemed the lesser evil: “Keep my current service.”
The next screen informed her that Xfinity was available in her new city and presented her with three different Xfinity plans. The only choices she had on the page were to select one of the plans, choose between a 1-year or 5-year plan, “Compare Providers,” or if she already had internet service, she could “Get Deals.”
Rybak clicked “Compare Providers,” which took her to another page of advertisements for internet providers—this time including offers from Spectrum and Verizon—that she did not want. She then clicked “Get Deals.” A cheerful header read, “Emilia, reward yourself for moving!” followed by advertisements for home security systems, furniture stores, and pizza. Rybak’s only options to move forward were a big blue button labeled, “GET ALL & CONTINUE” or a very light blue, harder-to-read button labeled, “Get only selected.” In tiny gray text at the bottom of the page, the website informed her that her contact information was being provided to the advertisers she selected. Once again, there was no option to skip or choose none.
At that point, Rybak was fed up. She abandoned the task and moved her cursor to close the website. But before she could, a pop up appeared on her screen. “Don’t go yet!” it said. “Moving is expensive, so why not save where you can?“ It was followed by two buttons: “GET ALL & CONTINUE” or “SELECT MY OFFERS.” Rybak closed the page, giving up, for the time being, on registering to vote.
Presenting ads with no options to close them; hiding buttons you don’t want users to click with small, lightly shaded text; and redirecting users on tangents away from their intended goal on a website are all textbook dark patterns, says Johanna Gunawan, a computer science and law professor at Maastricht University, in the Netherlands. But what alarmed her most about MyMove’s website was the context. Users might be prepared for deceptive design on a shopping website, but not when registering to vote.
When Rybak checked her email inbox after leaving the MyMove site, she found it topped off with messages from the advertisers she’d tried to avoid. She also had an email from MyMove stating that her voter registration was almost complete. All she needed to do was print a form, fill it out, and physically mail it in to an election office. If this all had to be done anyway, Rybak wondered, what was the point of the MyMove website?
It doesn’t appear there is one, if all you want to do is register to vote.
In a statement, MyMove told WIRED that everyone who begins the online voter registration process receives a “prompt” email with instructions for filling out and mailing in the required form, “independent of whether they choose to engage with any moving related promotional offers.”
“We understand that online experiences, particularly those connected to civic processes, demand particular care,” MyMove wrote. “We regularly review and refine our user experience and use customer feedback to update our products.”
“The Highest Level of Quality”
In the early 1990s, Brett Matthews was already a successful entrepreneur. He worked for a business that made informational booklets about medical conditions, paid for by drug or supplement makers, for doctors to read and display in their offices. One day, while filling out a change-of-address postcard, which used to be how movers notified USPS of their new mailing addresses, inspiration struck Matthews for a new middle-man business.
Matthews and his wife, Virginia Salazar, formed a company called Targeted Marketing Solutions and began cold-calling the postal service with a proposal: a public-private partnership where they would update and manage the agency’s change-of-address process free of charge; USPS would later allow them to package coupons and offers from advertisers into a physical welcome kit that would be mailed to each mover’s new home.
Matthews, who is now an executive at a plant-based nutritional shake company, tells WIRED that he and Salazar must have reached out to USPS 20 times before they got their foot in the door. Even after they caught the attention of postal officials, their proposal was bogged down in government processes, privacy concerns, and a debate about whether the welcome kits would imply that the US government endorsed the brands advertised in them.
In 1992, USPS agreed to run a pilot of the program. By 1995, Targeted Marketing Solutions had an exclusive, national contract. And in 1997, Vice President Al Gore gave the company an award for reinventing government. “Our goal, broadly stated, is to reclaim the original meaning of that phrase ‘good enough for government work,’ so that not too many years from now that phrase will mean the very best, the highest level of quality,” Gore said before presenting Matthews with the honor.
Matthews says that while he was involved, Targeted Marketing Solutions had its own user interface lab that studied the customer experience. The goal was to “make sure they get their service, it’s clear for them front and center, and then they can go on and get some value” from advertisements.
The Secret Contract
Matthews ran Targeted Marketing Solutions, which rebranded to Imagitas, through the launch of the first mover’s guide website in 2001, until shortly after its sale to shipping solutions company Pitney Bowes for $230 million in 2005. In 2015, Pitney Bowes sold Imagitas for $310 million to Red Ventures, which renamed it MyMove.
The details of USPS’s contract with MyMove are secret. Unlike most government agencies, whose contracts are subject to inspection under public records laws, USPS claims a special exemption to the federal Freedom of Information Act for its business contracts because it operates in a competitive field against private shipping firms.
As a result, the little information publicly available about the MyMove deal comes from a whistleblower lawsuit filed against the company in 2020 by a former director of operations, Marcos Arellano, who alleged that MyMove and Red Ventures executives purposefully misclassified expenses and revenues in order to defraud USPS.
Arellano’s complaint alleges that MyMove is responsible for maintaining, testing, and optimizing the Mover’s Guide website and is only allowed to sell customer data to advertisers once the customer has navigated away from the official USPS change-of-address page to MyMove’s site, which is where the voter registration workflow is kept.
The complaint is partially sealed to conceal specific details about the contract, but it claims that USPS is guaranteed a minimum cut each year, after which the agency and MyMove split any revenue generated by “visitors or abandoners” of MyMove.com.
Neither USPS nor MyMove answered WIRED’s questions about the contract.
As lucrative as dark patterns can be, they’re also increasingly drawing the attention of regulators. Last year, the FTC secured a $2.5 billion settlement with Amazon after accusing it of using manipulative design to trick customers into unwanted subscriptions. And in 2023, the agency reached a $245 million settlement with Epic Games, after alleging that the company used dark patterns to trick users into making unwanted payments.
In addition to the threat of a fine, many in the web design industry have come to see that employing aggressive dark patterns will quickly hurt their brand’s reputation with customers, says Gunawan, the Maastricht University professor.
“It’s kind of like a betrayal,” Gunawan says, especially coming from a website users perceive as an arm of their government. “It messes with my perception of trust because I trust the public institution, and I trust that their contracts are made in the best interest of citizenry.”
