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Comment by raxxorrax | Hacker News Reader

Good software behavior decreased staunchly in closed environments and especially on mobile. People aren't asked about telemetry, data hording is hidden in some lengthy TOS that you have to accept in most cases anyway.

Work at any company and want to decline the TOS of MS Word? Good luck...

Collecting data might be sensible, but it isn't too hard to ask.

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> Collecting data might be sensible, but it isn't too hard to ask.

Collecting data might be sensible ... for corporations. But, it is rarely for the consumer. That is why it is so hard to ask.

"Can I do this thing that you do not understand but probably have the feeling that is only going to be bad for you?". That is a hard question to ask, that is why the question is hidden behind weird concepts, lists of consent checkbox, or other dark-pattern mechanisms.

Collecting data might be sensible.. but only for one side of the deal. Data collection is a clear WIN-LOSE situation, a situation that is only accepted because there is an unsymmetrical amount of power in the relationship.

I mean, charging for products are a clear win-lose situation for customers, created by an asymmetrical power balance. There are good arguments for regulating data collection, but “customers should be able to pick and choose any aspect about using a product they’d rather not have and jettison it” is not one of them.

> charging for products are a clear win-lose situation for customers

That is not true. I pay money, I get a product I want. That is a win-win situation.

I see TV and the TV channel shows ads is a win-win situation.

I see YouTube and YouTube records who I am, where I live, my age, my relationship status, my political views.... to watch TV for free seems a very bad exchange.

I am not against the advertisement industry, but in its current form in conjunction with tech companies it is damaging society in very real, very harmful ways.

> > charging for products are a clear win-lose situation for customers

> That is not true. I pay money, I get a product I want. That is a win-win situation.

I get a product which spies on me and I cannot turn it off (android, win 10). Win for them, loose for me.

> I see TV and the TV channel shows ads is a win-win situation.

I paid for this channel - so win for them , loose for me.

> I see YouTube and YouTube records who I am, where I live, my age, my relationship status, my political views.... to watch TV for free seems a very bad exchange.

> I am not against the advertisement industry, but in its current form in conjunction with tech companies it is damaging society in very real, very harmful ways.

Yes. And they also pay politicians and lobbyists.

I'd pay for things if they included the source code.

No, as the customer does not have to fork over cash for the product. That is the benefit.

They're all terrified that if they do ask, they'll be declined, or held accountable for misuse, abuse, or leaks. It's much better to hide "telemetry" in the fog of tos or eula walls of text. Maintain your customer's blissful ignorance at all costs.

Privacy and liberty are inseparable at the highest levels of interacting with society. Compromising private personal information can only weaken individuals against abuse by society at large, whether by mega corporations, governments, Twitter hordes, or spam callers.

It's become overwhelmingly apparent that there's no benefit to the consumer by allowing telemetry in almost any form. The purported advantages are paltry straw men compared to the nightmare of identity and surveillance infrastructure.

…staggering that unchangeable/indelible personal, political, financial and even biometric/medical data which could potentially be leveraged against users, eg. in an aggregate profile by various forms of AI, is often seemingly slapdashedly stored/shunted around various shady ‘cloud’ services/data brokers. After all, seemingly ‘solid’ companies may go bust/become desperate, governments may change radically/may have radically different values if you plan/are forced by circumstances to move around the world, or what’s to stop eg. insurance policies/mortgages/rental contracts etc. etc. unfavourable to various dubiously-defined ‘categories’ of people in future being based on inferences made from these profiles/dystopian ‘social credit’-like schemes being introduced that could be calibrated based on all manners of unforeseen criteria…

This isn't particularly strange. Give one group of people power over another group of people and they will find a way to abuse it. The solution is that it should always be possible to install a new OS on any computing device that you buy and that there should be a way to install software in that OS that does need approval of the makers of the OS. Anything less is basically an invite to power abuse.

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