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0 pointsunethical_ban1y ago0 comments

Do you believe there is no utility in knowledge? Do you believe absolutism is the only philosophy for privacy?

I think telemetry and the data software collects can help with usability, design, and product enhancement and that it's very likely this can be done to some extent without harming privacy.

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autoexec1y ago

> I think telemetry and the data software collects can help with usability, design, and product enhancement

It can, but that's too often little more than a justification to take as much data as possible much of which is misused. In this case, what a person searches for on the internet isn't helping one bit with "usability, design, and product enhancement"

salawat1y ago

You know what? That's fine and good. Ask users to opt-in, and respect the wishes of those who opt-out.

Anything short of that is you ignoring the concept of consent entirely, and doing whatever mental gymnastics you can to feel fine with doing so.

Barrin921y ago

This has nothing to do with mental gymnastics. Consent isn't a meaningful concept when it comes to each individual setting of a piece of software. You'd have to make 500 decisions every minute if you had to actively consent to everything your software does.

In fact cookie banners show this. People hate them because they force meaningless choices on them. If you make a website with tracking as an opt-out option, almost everyone clicks "accept all". If you make a website with tracking as opt-in, almost every one clicks accept all. That shows that opt-in/out or consent does literally nothing ot reflect people's preferences, the act of making a choice completely dominates the actual decision.

That means that if you want to respect user preferences you don't actually get around making default choices for them, and it's why consent is pretty much meaningless.

bobthecowboy1y ago

> In fact cookie banners show this. People hate them because they force meaningless choices on them. If you make a website with tracking as an opt-out option, almost everyone clicks "accept all". If you make a website with tracking as opt-in, almost every one clicks accept all. That shows that opt-in/out or consent does literally nothing ot reflect people's preferences, the act of making a choice completely dominates the actual decision.

I disagree with this interpretation - the banners force themselves in front of the user before accessing the content. And then the choice is almost always "Accept all" and "complete a checklist mini-game of things you don't want cookies for". It's not a shock that people when confronted with this will click the easy button, and that doesn't mean it reflects their actual interests. It's just fatigue. If the "accept our cookies" button was off to the side of the page, and defaulted to "none" unless the user did something otherwise, I wonder what the "accept all" numbers would look like then. Actually, I don't.

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