141–150 of 168 posts
Especially on mobile some of these cookie management screens I've seen lately are HORRIBLE. If you're gonna make me click on every single partner to opt out of their tracking, I'm just not gonna use your site.
What a surprise! Microsoft villianised over the decades seems to be better than Google and Facebook. This brings us to the question. Have you paid XX money for a service that doesn’t show ads. Are you happy with it?
A villian doesn't become virtuous just because someone even worse turns up.
The criticism of Microsoft a few decades ago was in relation to Apple, OS/2, BeOS, Linux/BSD/etc. and I'm pretty sure those which still exist are still less villianous than Microsoft. Note that Apple is still villianous, but rather than just extorting their users directly, they prefer to extort everyone via massive tax avoidance.
> Have you paid XX money for a service that doesn’t show ads. Are you happy with it?
I make regular payments to the Free Software Foundation, Open Rights Group, Wikimedia, etc. and am generally happy with what they do. That's not always a direct contribution to the particular software I use, but it does support some things indirectly.
In relation to Microsoft, I hear that they charge money and show ads, and I mostly hear their customers complaining about their software and services rather than praising them. For example, the centralisation of Skype for spying purposes seems to have crippled its throughput; I saw someone struggling with this recently and suggested they try meet.jit.si which turned out to give a far smoother connection (since it's P2P, like Skype used to be).
Those flowcharts and color coding are amazing. Everyone: even if you skim the rest of the article (mind, it's ALL worth reading), scroll to the last few pages and LOOK at those. They're color-coded by ease of flow (and yes, a definition of that was selected and clearly explained). I'm excited by this because I feel that often when we talk about Dark Patterns, conversations often devolve into a "both-sides"-ism patter…
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Microsoft _still_ does not let me turn off "Basic usage data/telemetry" being sent to them. I tried to call them about it a month ago and they hung up on me. The one computer in my house running windows is still blocked with this popup.
Can you block it using a Pi-hole?
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I don't think it's crazy either, I just think it's totally inappropriate to tell people to think less of their friends when they don't have the full context. There's a lot of FB employees on HN and I wager a lot of them know how scummy their employer is. Yes, many are staying for the paycheck (and because leaving a job isn't an easy thing for everyone), but I know several who are staying because they feel that their…
> but I know several who are staying because they feel that their position is where they can produce the most good for the world Do you think Facebook is a net positive for the world? Borderline, or overwhelmingly? To be clear, I'm not asking whether some people get net benefit out of it, I'm talking about the net overall effect on society and the individuals within it. Personally, I believe it is causing tremendous…
Sticking to the "net positive / net negative" terms, imagine Facebook contributes a number of positive / negative points to the world. Now the sum can be a net negative, but that doesn't mean some line items aren't positives.
Where do you work? Is your company flawless? Are you a contributor to every single one of its misdeeds merely because you work there? This isn't an easy thing to answer for everyone. I think it's certainly a question more Facebook employees should ask themselves though.
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The worst offender I've encountered is imgur.com, where "click here to manage your privacy settings" brings you to a page with literally hundreds of advertisers. About half are on "allowed" by default. If you want to disallow, you have to select each entry individually . The other half only specify "requires opt-out", apparently imgur expects you to contact some third party to do so. How on earth they expect to wease…
>How on earth they expect to weasel around the law with this ham-fisted approach is beyond me. They reckon, perhaps correctly, that almost all websites weasel around the law and only very few of them will ever be fined. Privacy activists will go after the big fish first and there will be time for the small sites to correct course once it becomes clear what is and isn't permitted.
due to this assholeness, i null routed them at router level in my house, and at my work.
fuck imgur.
They've cancelled one of my flights and "automatically rebooked" into different one. Turns out it wasn't really automatic - scroll down the email and there's bunch of options with buttons "Click here to login". Because I didn't really accept my new automatic flight booking, I had to pay €30 check-in fee at the airport.
Im kind of torn on this. On one hand, I agree that these "dark patterns" undermine what legislators and voters want in terms of consumer protections and rights. Consumers and legislators need to be aware of it. On the other, I think it leads to a banal conclusion. Legislation tried to achieve something by putting responsibilities/restrictions on corporations. It did not achieve its goals, because companies "implement…
The GDPR is quite explicit on what consists of consent. This means that if European privacy regulators agree that this approach does not in fact means that users consented then Facebook/Google/Microsoft may be violating the GDPR. I think this is where, at least in theory, the GDPR is a major step forward: it has clear instructions on how information should be presented to users. Now we have to see if that theory actu…
I've had this argument a couple of times and I think it comes down to the semantics, though legal and legislative semantics are a little richer than most.
What I mean is that gdpr makes its intentions quite clear, but that's not how the legal system parses laws. What the consequences of gdpr are, in terms of practice is (1) all website visitors must sign a contract with the site owners (2) there are now some conventions and controls governing these contracts (3) the contracts empower the website owner to do most (not all) of what they could do before gdpr.
Gdpr does quasi-explicitely force website operators to provide "i don't agree" option. There are two potential ambiguities that could nullify this: (1) the exceptions in gdpr are ambiguous enough that all sites/services can claim them (2) dark patterns described in this paper make it so that a majority of users consent anyway.
IMO, considering "click here to agree and continue to the article" a valid consent is ridiculous. Contracts work when they are rare. We cannot solve this consent problem this way.