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Tell HN: Notion Desktop is monitoring your audio and network

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Re: Tell HN: Notion Desktop is monitoring your audio and network

#121

Post by impish9208 »

jitl wrote: post #53
chinathrow wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Make it opt-in and this would be not an issue.

Notion doesn't like making things opt-in. A feature that's opt-in will get like 1% of the use of a feature that's opt-out. A happier middle ground would be to enable by default and show a "I don't like this, pls turn it off" button the first few times. EDIT: shouldn't single out any specific role here. We think opt-out, enable-by-default makes a feature have far greater total utility. But we could do more to provide…

> Our PMs don't like making things opt-in.

“Ze engagement metrics must go up on ze dashboard every quarter, jah!” I can’t wait for the day PMs and other parasites find a new industry to move to. They sure have sucked the fun out of this one.

Re: Tell HN: Notion Desktop is monitoring your audio and network

#122

Post by JadeNB »

jraph wrote: post #117
_kush wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that’s the new "Local Network" prompt which started appearing since macOS 15. Any app that opens a multicast/broadcast socket (mDNS, SSDP, WebRTC ICE, etc.) now has to ask. Electron apps (including Notion) do this by default, so you see this dialog.

> Electron apps (including Notion) do this by default Feels like a bad default, it teaches user to ignore and say yes.

> Feels like a bad default, it teaches user to ignore and say yes.

I believe that, broadly speaking, from all but the most scrupulous app developers' point of view, it is a good thing for users to blindly agree to permissions. This is obviously true if they are doing something nefarious, but even true if not, since every user who denies a permission to your app is a user who might be writing a nasty review about such-and-such an advertised feature that doesn't work. I hope very much that my OS will make it easy for me to behave in a security-conscious way—a hope that is almost always disappointed!—but I do not even bother to have such a hope for all but my most beloved apps, which are often beloved for exactly that reason.

Re: Tell HN: Notion Desktop is monitoring your audio and network

#123

Post by jraph »

JadeNB wrote: post #122
jraph wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Electron apps (including Notion) do this by default Feels like a bad default, it teaches user to ignore and say yes.

> Feels like a bad default, it teaches user to ignore and say yes. I believe that, broadly speaking, from all but the most scrupulous app developers' point of view, it is a good thing for users to blindly agree to permissions. This is obviously true if they are doing something nefarious, but even true if not, since every user who denies a permission to your app is a user who might be writing a nasty review about such…

"Hey, head's up, this doesn't work because you didn't give us permission to {...}, needed because {...}. [Fix this]" would not be the end of the world.

Re: Tell HN: Notion Desktop is monitoring your audio and network

#124

Post by bayindirh »

fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #83
sturza wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are infinite ways on how to inform users of a new feature and ask to activate it.

And nearly all of them are annoying and disrupt my flow.

The same thing disrupts your flow allows me to make informed decisions, and I'm happy to be offered a choice, and ability to change my mind later.

Re: Tell HN: Notion Desktop is monitoring your audio and network

#125

Post by bayindirh »

hackinthebochs wrote: post #116
chinathrow wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your new feature is privacy invading. It's none of your business to detect if someones mic is on unless they invite you to do that. What is so hard about that? > Our PMs don't like making things opt-in. Lamest excuse ever. I wouldn't be surprised if you phoned back home about that mic activation - do you? I recently joined an org where Notion is in use - I will actively lobby them to not install the desktop app, at a…

What exactly is the privacy issue with detecting when a process begins using the microphone?

Following my habits, and reporting to a data broker that how I use my microphone, allowing even more precise profiling of my life circumstances or habits.

Re: Tell HN: Notion Desktop is monitoring your audio and network

#126

Post by xelia »

Pi9h wrote: post #103
xelia wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I self host docmost and love it, thank you for making it! Will you consider making it publishable as a wiki? The current share feature is close but forces me to share a specific URL and live-edit public pages.

The next sharing goal would be to make it possible to share an entire "Space", but not the "Workspace" itself. Would that fit the ideas you have in mind?

Yes! I maintain documentation relating to music production and want to make it public, while also ideally also accepting contributions (though I'm not sure how that'd look like).

It would be nice to have a way to have WIP be private until I publish the changes.

Re: Tell HN: Notion Desktop is monitoring your audio and network

#127

Post by mbreese »

jitl wrote: post #53
chinathrow wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Make it opt-in and this would be not an issue.

Notion doesn't like making things opt-in. A feature that's opt-in will get like 1% of the use of a feature that's opt-out. A happier middle ground would be to enable by default and show a "I don't like this, pls turn it off" button the first few times. EDIT: shouldn't single out any specific role here. We think opt-out, enable-by-default makes a feature have far greater total utility. But we could do more to provide…

Get better PMs. Seriously. Users shouldn’t have to opt-out of something for privacy. Respecting privacy should be the default. If a user finds value in letting you listen to the microphone, then great! But you have to inform them! There are also other ways to get the same information — such as if the user also shares their calendar. This is sneaky and evasive behavior.

But none of this conversation makes me want to use Notion. We used to use it at $OLDJOB for meeting notes and light DB work for non-technical users. Now I’m happy we stopped.

Re: Tell HN: Notion Desktop is monitoring your audio and network

#128

Post by JadeNB »

jraph wrote: post #123
JadeNB wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Feels like a bad default, it teaches user to ignore and say yes. I believe that, broadly speaking, from all but the most scrupulous app developers' point of view, it is a good thing for users to blindly agree to permissions. This is obviously true if they are doing something nefarious, but even true if not, since every user who denies a permission to your app is a user who might be writing a nasty review about such…

"Hey, head's up, this doesn't work because you didn't give us permission to {...}, needed because {...}. [Fix this]" would not be the end of the world.

> "Hey, head's up, this doesn't work because you didn't give us permission to {...}, needed because {...}. [Fix this]" would not be the end of the world.

You don't need to convince me, as a software user, but the app developers! And it's hard to blame them. I'm a teacher, and I rail against students who won't read the plain instructions before working on an assignment, but I also see it in myself: when I'm rushing through what I have to do, to get to what I want to do, I can stare right at a block of text and simply not register crucial parts of it. So such a plain instruction seems straightforward, but you'd still get users somehow managing to click it out of the way and then saying it doesn't work, and even one such user is a user that you wouldn't have to deal with if you made the permission opt-out.

Re: Tell HN: Notion Desktop is monitoring your audio and network

#129

Post by oehpr »

Pi9h wrote: post #13

If anyone is looking for an alternative to Notion without the bloat, I’m building https://docmost.com . It has a nice UI, real-time collaboration, diagrams support and more. You can self-host it too.

I've been looking for a tool like this that can publish. I was thinking of some way to create a help doc system for end users, but interleaved with technical information and discussion for devs. IE to make the help documentation a single source of truth for application behaviour.

All this needs to work is the ability to mark blocks of the document as "public" so only that gets published properly. Any possibility of doing this currently or interest in supporting in the future?

Re: Tell HN: Notion Desktop is monitoring your audio and network

#130

Post by jitl »

chaps wrote: post #99
jitl wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

let me look EDIT: no, there's no transmission of logs or analytics events besides a check to see if the feature is enabled. We only transmit some data if you ask Notion to record.

Thanks for the answer. Just want to clarify for pedantic reasons - is there transmission regardless of whether it's enabled or disabled? And does that happen only if someone asks Notion to record?

If you ask Notion to record will record if you don’t ask to record, we won’t record
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