Apple suspends Siri response grading in response to privacy concerns

Why? Because they don't want to set off any so-called smart speakers.

I'd argue that going so low as to change the way we speak just to accommodate these devices is quite terrible, and if you have to watch what you say so that a smart speaker don't misunderstand you, then it's not very smart.

Their listeners shouldn't complain that their hosts use the word Alexa. They should complain to the vendors that their products are garbage.

I wouldn't use one of those even if they weren't garbage, but at least I wouldn't be infuriated every time I hear someone on the podcast stop themselves from saying the name of the product that's the topic of their discussion.

My points are:

- while I might be an uninteresting target, this doesn’t mean others are not. Lawyers, Doctors, Jiurnalists, Activists and so on certainly are targets that are and will be spied on if it is easily possible for adverseries to get the data (e.g. without a real.court ruling etc). I profit from a society where these groups and their communications are protected. The chance that this can be used against these groups in form of kompromat for example is enough for privacy rules to exist.

- Privacy rules also try to counteract a inbalance of power. In the age of complexity those with more and better information have more and better power. “We are the good ones” or “But we would never do such a thing” are cute arguments, but ultimatively I want to live in a state where the accumulation of power by unelected forces is limited by design. When a company knoes all about you while they themselves tell you only the marketing version, there is a extreme inbalance in power that benefits them against you. In practice it would look a bit like the cambridge analytica thing where every individual saw only (fake) things that nudged them into one or the other direction by using facebooks targeted adverticement, but on a bigger scale it was targeted manipulation by false imformation. This is not only unethical, but potentially dangerous to the instable societies we live in.

- privacy is about marketing. The big californian giants are so good to make things simple for all of us. But when it comes to the question how much data they collect when, they cannot give a straight simple answer, but a wall of legalese that doesn’t tell anybody what’s going on. If you actively decept people by downplaying the potential impact of the privacy violations you profit from, that is unethical for sure.

That beeing said you can have the standpoint that making money is more important than a functioning society with trust between citizen and the companies they are customers of — but don’t be surprised when the accumulation of power and the erosion of democratic principles show devastating results. Tech companies do shape our future if they wan’t or not. The question is, if they do it by critically following up onto their good intentions, or by blindly giving in to their incentives?

Right now it looks like the latter.

This ignores human nature: requiring people to make a decision, any decision, is a friction point that will lose users. Something like "we'd like to increment a counter when our app crashes, we won't log anything else than that single bit".

So first of all, you'll have people who will claim that you could be lying, and they'll opt out, or not install your app, or whatever. Fine. But now all the people who truly didn't and don't actually care will have to make a decision. And making choices takes effort. So some people will just refuse to make a choice, and you'll lose users.

Consider the other side of this: I'm from the US but currently in Europe. GDPR requires explicit consent for the various trackers, it has defaults. I don't change them. I don't want to think about them. I don't care enough. And it's just effort I have to expend before I actually get to the stuff I'm interested in. Like a government mandated paywall (think the "we use cookies..." but more extreme, with checkboxes to decide which cookies they can store).

Even as someone who truly actually doesn't care, and is happy to, in the abstract, give explicit consent to all the tracking these sites do, I don't want to have to explicitly consent, because its work to do something I don't care about.

I expect, though I'm by no means certain, that most people who aren't on HN are in that bucket. And that means that requiring explicit consent for otherwise innocuous things is just bad for business with little gain, and it numbs people for explicit consent on actually important things.