Maybe there needs to be a law about default settings and privacy.
[Edit] Maybe add a sample of live data potentially usable with the requested permission? Give people the 'why does he want my fiancé's number?' moment
It's still inferior to Cyanogenmod's Privacy Guard feature that can silently revoke permissions without the app being aware of it, but I think it's a step in the right direction.
What I'm trying to say is that there are various other reasons people care about then just permissions and security.
I think it will cause the app to ask you for permission again when it starts, but it's good to know it's not a one-time-only option.
Externalized costs complicate the libertarian approach.
By extending the definition of 'force' to include 'being inconvenienced' we cheapen and muddy an important concept. Asking your colleague to convert a Word doc to a different format is inconvenient. But forcing compliance for something via fines, jail time etc. - essentially at gunpoint - is a much more serious affair, even if the person being forced is the CEO of one of those evil privacy-violating corporations.
Your appeal to worse problems[0] does not invalidate any of the problems with privacy violations we are discussing here.
Here's a better definition of externalized costs in the form of force: any behavior which, when engaged in by a company, causes other companies' or users' life options to be reduced (even if just by increasing inconvenience of safer/healthier/more private options), or which when practiced by a plurality leads to a net negative result for society at large, is an action resulting in externalized costs.
What is your horse in the race?
I can't even bring myself to use Facebook with how little I trust them with my information, but my friends are comfortable logging every place they go in it for the whole world to see? I can't live in this world...
This isn't to say Facebook is better, it's just far easier to surprise someone with Google because Google makes it possible for you to see what they know about you. It's safe to assume Facebook has the same information.
I was already aware that they were doing it, but I was still shocked to see it in the Google Maps App (Menu-Your timeline).
Just seeing all that information about me with a nice calendar interface of where I've been on any date, I found very confronting. Up until then I had it in my mind as some ethereal "I know they have that information", but it's just so easily accessible it's scary.
And the creepy notification popups asking me for more information about places that I've been... Creepy.
It's still turned on for the time being, because I'm vaguely curious about the tracking itself, but I'm very nervous about the whole thing...
MS has a monopoly, through intent & ubiquity, on business class software, gaming & new computer sales(w/ OSX it is duopoly). Sure there are options for the technical folks, for everyone else it's spyware.
If we don't enact laws then jumping boats only leads to the next popular thing being careless with our privacy. I want to be certain that regardless of what software I'm using the people who developed that software have a common concern for the protection of privacy. When enough people have a common concern we usually enact those concerns in laws because it's the minimum we expect from civil participants in society.
But saying you want to use Facebook is like saying you want to get cancer.
If this trend continues, the company that replaces facebook will have much better respect of privacy than those that came before it.
There are a number of cultural issues that we'll have to face, but the cognitive dissonance that occurs in corporations whereby employees make decisions that benefit the company but harm themselves is one of the most important.
For the average computer user, Windows is not really necessary, and equivalent software exists on other platforms. For professional users this probably isn't true, and it'll depend on what their businesses choose to deploy, and how cross-platform that software is.
I currently work for a datacenter that officially support Windows and Mac, and allows employees to run Linux unofficially and self-support. While the community that arose from this is quite frankly awesome, it's been a troubling journey, and I still have some convenience features that I learned to live without. Windows, for all its faults, has tighter integration with all of our company's tools, and living without the un-managed company images and easy updates is unproductive for most of our staff that aren't linux/mac enthusiasts. The choice is there though, and I'm grateful for that.
Particularly to enthusiasts like me who like to do advanced stuff occasionally, ie not frequently enough that it makes sense to learn by heart all sort of commands, and where the cost of having to understand all sort of concepts and acronyms is prohibitive if I just want to do something once.
Windows for that is very powerful, the UI goes quite a long way.
Fine for doing the basics (slowly)... Until you need to do something even semi-powerful, then you will curse the lack of a good CLI.
I find in Windows that because most programs don't actually support a CLI at all, it's actually impossible to do lots of stuff that I'd like to do.
Plus I get a nice feeling when I can put together an elegant little sed (or whatever) command to do exactly what I need to do in seconds. The learning curve is high but the satisfaction is great, same as learning programming.
I can see how having to google for commands is a bridge too far for some people, but I get much more annoyed having to do extra mouse clicks everywhere than having to google a command that I can hopefully find a use for later as well.
Source: linux user who is forced to use windows all day at work.
I fundamentally disagree with that. If you are trying to set up a single Virtual Machine having never done it, you will go way faster with a UI than if you need to figure out the commands and how the whole thing works. If you need to set up 100 VMs then yes, CLI becomes the fast (and only practical) way.
> I find in Windows that because most programs don't actually support a CLI at all
Windows has CLI support for pretty much all advanced features, although admittedly scattered across various technologies. Where it lacks CLI is for user features, like customizing the UI of the desktop, switching off sounds, etc.
> The learning curve is high but the satisfaction is great, same as learning programming.
A steep learning curve is not a positive thing. Having a powerful IDE goes a long way to make a programming language self-discoverable and flattening the learning curve (Visual Studio for C# and VB is for that absolutely priceless). I wish CLIs had powerful autocomplete features that were aware of the state of the system (like you type "Stop-VM " and the autocomplete would suggest the names of the VMs available in that context). The most advanced CLI in windows (powershell) is miles away from being that good. And as far as I know there is none of that in Linux.
And keep in mind the problem is not just having to "google the syntax". You have ten different distributions of linux, 10 different tools to do the same thing, all have different syntax, acronyms, concepts and commands that will break the system if used against the wrong version. Since there is no easy way to visualise the state of the system, it is very hard for a non experienced user to progress in linux, and trial and error is time consuming and not fun.
I am not a fan of Windows, and in fact I am seriously considering switching to Linux rather than having to use Windows 10. But all these things are holding me back. I am not an IT professional and only have a limited amount of time I can spend re-learning the basics (firewalls, setting up websites, virtual machines, various jobs, etc).
What I wish existed is an environment that was maintaining a perfect symmetry between UI and CLI, where everything can be done with a UI, but where the OS gives you the CLI equivalent of what you are doing with a UI (a bit like Excel's record macros).
Just a comment: you can use a GUI in linux just like in Windows, it's just that mostly everything is CLI-aware, or has a CLI command as well, which is nice when you want to script something.
It would really be nice to see smarter autocomplete on the CLI, hopefully someone is working on it. I can see why it might be complicated to implement though as you'd need better integration with the terminal for autosuggest popups, etc, and this might not work well over ssh.
Also a better way to find commands that you don't know about yet would be nice, maybe searching installed programs by feature? Like "findcommand image" would give you a list of programs that can modify images, and what they can do to them?
man [thing I want to know about]
[command I'm trying to run] --help
There is a learning curve for Linux, but realistically, I found it to be about the same learning curve as using anything I hadn't used before on a Windows system. For basic tasks, Ubuntu Desktop is pretty darn fantastic at working out of the box, and its Software Manager parallels the Windows app store quite nicely for programs that do normal things. (Web browsers, ftp clients, office software, music players, etc etc.)
I choose to run something more complex (Arch linux, presently) because I want to know more about my system, and because I like experimenting with desktop environments. But once you understand how one package manager works, you can perform most basic system administration tasks between the various distributions without a huge amount of effort, and the package manager takes care of most of the fiddly configuration details for you in the process. I find this far easier than trying to set up services in Windows, or dealing with the awful registry.
Of course, I do still keep Windows around. I have a dual boot on my home desktop, and I boot into Windows regularly for the sole purpose of playing games. For all the things I love about Linux, the one thing the community still hasn't gotten down as well as a Windows system is proper GPU acceleration. For now, Windows takes the cake easily on that, and it's reasonably stable when that's all I use it for.
I do find the lack of standardization on command arguments slightly annoying in linux... Is it [command] --help, [command] -h, or just [command] by itself? It would be nice if there was something that could be relied upon.
Also handling of filenames with spaces could be standardized as well. Is it -0, -print0, or --null to get null-termination? I always forget which program wants what.
Unfortunately, I have to keep Windows around for Ableton Live. Linux is not great for professional-ish audio.
In my opinion that shares a remarkable similarity to the concept of fraud: In law, fraud is deliberate deception to secure unfair or unlawful gain, or to deprive a victim of a legal right.
How can the user be responsible for their own actions when the results of their actions are deliberately obscured by the people who wrote the software?
That's debatable. The enforceability of an EULA depends on the details of the situation.
> contracts
Many are not a contract, which has specific requirements. Even when an EULA is a contract, unconscionable parts - perhaps a clause that is clearly about a "dark pattern" scam - can be nullified.
Also, every contract may contain clauses which may be ruled unenforceable. This is not an unknown, and is why every contract has a severability clause. [2]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_form_contract#Contrac...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-user_license_agreement#Enf...
Specifically: "No court has ruled on the validity of EULAs generally; decisions are limited to particular provisions and terms."
Also the privacy settings are not "obscure" there are options when updating and options in the settings menu quite visible.
Unfortunately, government legislation in the form of copyright law prohibits this. If it were up to me, copyright law would be repealed. But failing that, we can't have a situation where all the laws favor corporations and none favor individuals, at least not unless we want to slide into the kind of dystopia cyberpunk writers have been warning us about for generations.
AFAIK what it doesn't prohibit is sharing information on how to disable that spyware, or even software that will do it for you.
Take an original Windows ISO, feed it to an app, and out comes an ISO with your customisations. If you're feeling neighbourly and rebellious, you can share that ISO with others. This is not a new concept --- see projects like nLite, and all the various customised Windows versions that you can find on the torrent sites.