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Comment by brad0 | Hacker News Reader

Anyone who knows android dev knows this is a non issue. The permission they request doesn't even do anything in lollipop and later. Sounds more like a bad dev than anything malicious.

What's the saying? Never attribute to malice with what can be explained by stupidity?

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I think that proverb is not for accuracy, but rather for gentle social relations. Otherwise, a more balanced approach would sound like, attribute a set of factors X to a phenomena Y in whatever way you think is most fit or empirically economical, or better sounding would be, "choose the middle way".

That way, you are neither under-trusting nor over-trusting.

If the prompt is there it surely must do something. Otherwise google would remove it because the fewer prompts the better.

>Never attribute to malice with what can be explained by stupidity

Hanlon's razor

Is a logical fallacy that is overused and hardly ever true, and should be relegated to the dustbin of intellectual discourse where it belongs.

It's not a logical argument. It's more of a heuristic of human behavior, which tends to be right. Only rarely is there someone sitting behind a large desk making tent hands while laughing maniacally.

EDIT: On second thought, if it is a logical argument, it's a specific case of Occam's Razor. Which is more likely? Someone made a mistake, or there is a grand conspiracy?

Here's another fallacy: the fallacy of the excluded middle or the false dichotomy. There are many alternatives on the spectrum between "mistake" and "grand conspiracy".

Exactly. These include such situations as:

- a mistake where misaligned incentives are against fixing it

- a questionable decision exacerbated by a mistake

- malice on the part of an external actor plus internal incompetence (essentially all data breaches)

With the modern anti-corollary: neoliberalism.

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