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Comment by skybrian | Hacker News Reader

It’s an unwarranted assumption that people given a question to answer always understand what it’s asking and answer truthfully. Another possibility is that many users won’t understand or care much and will just click at random to make the dialog go away. Or they might use default rules like saying “no” to anything they don’t understand.

Since we can’t ask users what they meant, it’s not something we can know.

For more skepticism about the over-interpretation of survey results: https://carcinisation.com/2020/12/11/survey-chicken/

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In general this is a an argument that users shouldn't be given a choice because "you" know better than some/many users. So "who" knows enough to force an option on everyone because some users might not understand this choice between having Facebook track information about them or not?

Would you argue that increasingly targeted advertisement is enough of a net good that the choice to avoid it should be gone?

I think Apple’s approach is reasonable and I don’t have a better way. I’m just warning against over-interpreting the results as a strong preference.

So this argument reduces to: “People might not understand a question which is important that they understand. So let’s just not ask them in case they misunderstand and assume they answer in a way that is beneficial to us.”

Does that sound right?

Not at all. I didn’t suggest any alternative. Given the controversy, I’m not sure there’s a better one.

But you might compare to what browsers do these days for visiting websites with fishy-looking certificates. They don’t just put up a dialog, they heavily discourage it, because the assumption is that many users would say “yes” just to get rid of the dialog.

And with the vastly-majority of sites now using HTTPS certificates, the "invalid SSL certificate" page has become exceptional enough to have me actually read the "why" is the browser complaining so much, instead of just clicking on the "eh, whatever, I know the risk, drive me in!" button, which I would have clicked without remorse 15-20 years ago.

That could be a good argument for Facebook explaining why they ask for a permission before prompting, as many apps do. but it’s hard to believe this is their reasoning when they’ve strenuously avoided both asking permission and honestly explaining what they intend to use it for. They’ve had years to be more transparent and have presumably thought about why they’ve spent millions fighting it.

Facebook has regularly taken the position that users know what they're opting into when they use Facebook.

If they want to take the position now that their users don't understand what "tracking" even is, then Facebook was lying before when they said they had informed consent from their users to do that tracking.

The advertising industry regularly wants to have its own cake and eat it too on this point. They want to say that users understand and consent to the system, but also that users are too uneducated or lazy to acknowledge that consent in any way.

And to a small extent, there is a grain of truth here: most users don't understand the full extent of what tracking is and how companies are targeting them. But that's not a point in the advertising industry's favor. Companies like Facebook acknowledging that users don't know what they're opting into or out of only makes it more obvious just how inadequate their click-through TOSes and privacy FAQs always were.

That’s also an argument against allowing everyone to vote.

It’s a fully general argument against trusting knowledge gained from surveys, and I do think we should be skeptical that voters always know what they’re doing. Particularly for elections they aren’t paying attention to.

The “will of the people” is something of a myth. Votes go in and the algorithm makes a decision. Do you feel represented when the decision isn’t what you wanted?

But it’s not an argument against elections because I’m not claiming I have a better idea. We do need some peaceful way of making decisions that people will accept. A legitimate, accepted process beats chaos, and new processes aren’t easily adopted.

Elections are less about finding the optimal will of the people and more about creating an adversarial environment for politicians in order to prevent capture by a single party.

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