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Only Emilia Rybak He wanted to register to vote.

Last fall, Reback was moving from New York to Florida, and the first step in a long line of forms and papers seemed easy: United States Postal Service Movers directory website.

Like tens of millions of Americans each year, Reback went to the site, filled out a simple form with her old and new addresses, paid the $1.25 identity verification fee, then checked a box indicating she also wanted to update her data. Voter registration.

“I said, ‘This is definitely something I’m going to put off or forget about until it’s time to vote and I’m going to do my best to do that,'” Reback says. “This is a very timely option. And why not do it now through USPS?”

But when Reback, who runs a user behavior research consulting firm, clicked a button to continue updating her voter registration, she didn’t see anything related to voting. Instead, she was redirected to a new website, with the USPS logo in the bottom corner, forcing her to click a series of unskippable ads. “You don’t have to be a[user experience]professional to be able to follow this flow and see that it’s highly unethical,” says Rybak.

For more than 30 years, one company, now called MyMove, has held the exclusive contract to operate USPS’s change of address and voter registration service. The government does not spend a dime on it. Instead, advertisers pay MyMove for the privilege of filling carriers’ mailboxes and inboxes with junk — or deals, depending on your point of view — and MyMove splits the profits with the USPS. Or at least, they’re supposed to.

This public-private partnership, born when the Internet was still in its embryonic stage, was hailed by then-Vice President Al Gore as a shining example of government innovation. But it has turned into a government-sanctioned hack that, experts and users claim, uses deceptive and potentially illegal design practices. These techniques, which experts often refer to as “dark patterns,” prevent users from completing their intended goals and manipulate them into clicking buttons, giving up personal information, and entering into agreements they don’t want.

The MyMove-USPS partnership continued despite MyMove and its parent company, Red Ventures, paying $2.75 million in 2023 to settle a whistleblower’s claim that they defrauded the USPS. (There was no determination of liability as a result of the settlement.) The most frustrating aspects of the voter registration site remained for years, despite a steady influx of Internet users. Reviews Which claims that MyMove is “a scam set up by a broker to steal your information,” “useless misinformation for the USPS,” and “one of the worst experiences I’ve ever had. It’s straight up predatory.”

Reback, who filed a complaint with the USPS Inspector General after trying to register to vote, documented her experience in screenshots and notes. WIRED independently reviewed a similar, though not identical, workflow when completing the voter registration process in MyMove.

says Lior Strahilevitz, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School, who… research Show 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 no entity that partners with the federal government should be using so many manipulative sales tactics and compromising citizens’ privacy in this way.”

A former senior FTC official, who requested anonymity because their current employer had not authorized them to speak on the matter, described MyMove’s website as “extremely problematic” and had concerns about whether its current user interface might put the company at risk of regulatory action.