
Mailchimp: Possible GDPR Related Dark Patterns - ukdeveloper
I&#x27;ve been handling a GDPR process for a mailing list which had approx 14k subscribers. The list is for a niche website notifying them of new articles (free).<p>We used mailchimp&#x27;s suggested process[1] of sending an email with an opt-in link taking them to a form with a consent checkbox. Subscribers failing to opt-in actually remain on the list for billing purposes, but without a GDPR flag set.<p>My task, to save costs was to remove around 8k subscribers...<p>I created a segment to filter using their newly created GDPR fields, but whenever that segment is used it takes several minutes to load. Cycling through the pager takes a similar time too.<p>There is no way to easily delete all users in this segment, There is only a select visible checkbox, not a select all checkbox, at most you can only select 100 email addresses at once. It does retain the selection if you go to the next page, but it does take a long time to do so.<p>Once you trigger the delete action, it adds it as a background task, this makes sense but it affects the pager in an unpredictable way, the safest way is just to wait, go back to the list screen and reapply the segment. It&#x27;s easy to get stuck on a page that says there is no results when there are.<p>I&#x27;ve found the only way to do it with my list is to break the segment down so the result is less than a thousand (I started with accounts not changed in x years, then get more recent), then I go through those pages deleting those users.<p>It&#x27;s taken me a couple of hours to delete about 3,000 so far.<p>Funnily enough, when using segments that don&#x27;t relate to GDPR the UI is much snappier. Is this poor database optimisation for a rushed feature, or a dark UI pattern to dissuade people from using this?<p>Why no Select All button?, I vaguely remember them having one in the past, when I was doing research on how to handle selection of large numbers of records, but I cannot be sure about that.<p>[1] http:&#x2F;&#x2F;eepurl.com&#x2F;dqP8Bb
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ukdeveloper
Trying to achieve this task via the API is also problematic, accessing the
segment is equally slow.

It would be quicker to just go through the entire list - but the member
records don't yet have access to the GDPR fields/flags.

I know some of this is mailchimp just not being ready for the regulations, but
it does seem like with the development resources they have, they should be
able to fix these issues quickly.

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chris__butters
GDPR fields aren't accessible through the API at the minute, MailChimp are
apparently working on it but I wouldn't hold my breath.

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chris__butters
You can create a segment and export it as a CSV, that way you can then
reimport into a new list with the related GDPR fields and delete the old list.

I wouldn't necessarily say it's a dark pattern, it's just a bad UI.

