Totally irresponsible. What if another person (colleague, family member, friend, spouse) opens this on your computer?
This should be opt-in, not opt-out!
This should be opt-in, not opt-out!
The truth is, people want conforting lies.
If you're not informed, it's your fault. You did legally consent.
That said, could Google do better at explaining these things and giving controls and changing opt-outs to opt-ins? Sure.
But the argument you made is false.
Terms and conditions are written to be very opaque and to obscure what you're "agreeing" to. What you're saying is that you need to effectively be an attorney in order to be able to have informed consent.
> You did legally consent.
I didn't say otherwise. I was talking about actual consent, not legal consent.
> But the argument you made is false.
I disagree, obviously.
Or read commentary about it. Which exists in abundance.
> I was talking about actual consent, not legal consent.
If you could define what you mean by "actual consent," and compare it to "legal consent," that would be great.
Commentary about terms and conditions doesn't really help for a whole bunch of reasons.
What I mean by "actual consent" is that I've been fully informed what the deal is and I've actively said "yes".
Legal consent is a lower bar than that. For example, if a service lays out the deal in a document that can't be clearly understood by a normal person and/or that is ambiguous (meaning that a normal person can reasonably understand it to mean something that it does not mean), agreeing to it is legal consent, but not real consent -- real consent requires that each party fully know what they're consenting to.
I mean, what do you wish were different?
You can argue that, but as I said, that would require everyone to be a lawyer in order to properly analyze and understand those agreements. I think that's an unreasonable expectation.
What I wish were different is three things:
1) That I am clearly and correctly informed what would happen to my data if I agree (and that those terms will not change without me being clearly and correctly informed of the change before it happens and my consent being obtained again).
2) That I have to explicitly consent rather than having consent "implied" by, for instance, just beginning to use a service. And if the data is going to be used or handled by an entity other than the one I'm directly dealing with, that entity also has to get my explicit consent.
3) That no data is collected about me in the absence of my overt consent.
To be honest, it's #3 that angers me the most. My data is constantly being collected without my consent merely by doing things like going to a web site, or playing a game, or that companies like Facebook and Google get data about me when I buy something in a physical store using a credit/debit card.
If a program defaults to writing in a hidden folder, probably what it's writing is not for my benefit.
If it's for my benefit, and I approve of it, it can go in /home/name/clear-folder or c:\users\name\documents\folder in an open and documented format with an open API.
If it's going in /home/name/.hidden/cache/dont-look or c:\users\name\appdata\company\{GUID} in an undocumented opaque blob without my knowledge, approval or explicit consent, it's much harder to argue that it's "for my benefit" and expect that I'd agree with that claim.
Turn everything opt-in and your computer reverts to being a disconnected 1990s less-useful computer.
Turn everything opt-out and your computer is increasingly tempting to be someone else's tool, a wringer for your life, a cash-extracting manipulation and abuse tool that does things you don't know about and didn't agree too, for other people's benefit. And we're not talking a defensible social good benefit like herd immunity to vaccines, either.
The real shock in these comments is not that "HN is amazed Google gathers this" or "HN is blazé about Google gathering this", it's "HN hasn't been able to log their own plain text search queries locally onto a NAS if they want to"