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Comment by exabrial | Hacker News Reader

Because Facebook and Google have been guided by the principal: if it's not illegal, it's ethical. Just take a look at the language in UIs lately, it's gotten passive aggressive; instead of a polite "No thanks", our choices are now: "Maybe later". I thought 'no means no'? Silicon valley had a serious ethics problem; as much as they try to ride the white horse on 'I don't want Google partnering with the DOD", watch their eyes light up when you give them access to a middle class single mom's phone with a click through EULA.

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On Android 5, every time you enable GPS, a popup comes up asking you to share location with Google. There is a checkbox "don't ask me again", but if you tick it, the button "Decline" becomes inactive [1]. So it is going to pop up every time you want to know your location unless you agree. This attitude is openly hostile to the user (and yes, that's why we need more regulation).

[1] https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/115944/in-lollip...

This will keep going as long as people buy these devices. The only way to stop this is to hit them in their wallet.

There's no plausible path for market forces to apply pressure on something like this. There are many other factors that are more obvious to people choosing a smartphone - screen size, storage size, price, familiarity, and so on. And you basically have two platforms to choose from: Android and iOS.

GDPR provides a timely example. The potential fines for companies storing private data and not complying are 'hitting them in their wallet' in a way that the choices of individual users can't.

Raising awareness on social media might also work.

right people when buying a phone are going to ask - does this give you a way to stop sharing location data with google forever?

And of course the website or salesperson offerring the device will know and answer accurately.

Well you might get burned once but not twice. I once got burned by Android’s carrier crapware and lack of updates. I am now a faithful iOS user.

This won't work because people who care about privacy are the minority. Neither Google nor Apple will care about minorities.

That’s horrible. I’ve seen some atrociously bad nag requests, but that has to take the cake.

Funnily enough, when it comes to USB devices, Android is completely opposite. They give you a pop up with a checkbox to remember the device, but it doesn’t actually remember it. Next time you plug in the same device, the same pop up recurs.

Sounds like a bug, since this definitely does not happen on any of my android devices.

I have the same experience every time I "select a default app for this action." Without fail, I'll get the same pop-up next time I want to perform that action (any action). I just stopped checking the box.

Samsung has been doing this since the g3. It offers "high accuracy". Bull, just use my GPS chip.

I'm on Android 8. I can toggle every service on my which settings without unlocking the phone (wifi, mobile data, Bluetooth, flashlight, airplane mode, screen rotation...) but if I want to turn off location services, I have to enter a security code. Turns right on, though, no passcode required.

Meanwhile high accuracy drains battery like a sieve. You can switch to low accuracy, but it will nag you to turn it back on high accuracy to use even the most mundane location curious app. And if you turn off location and turn it back on, it purposefully doesn't remember - back to high accuracy by default.

Can't you just track my every move with simple GPS, Google?

>but if I want to turn off location services, I have to enter a security code. Turns right on, though, no passcode required.

That is somewhat reasonable, though. It's a security feature, designed that way so that a thief can't keep you from locating your phone remotely.

Whether it's an effective feature is a different matter.

It's all down to the hyper-toxic idea that every company must now extract as much data from you as possible. Google and Facebook were two of the early pioneers of "here is a 'free' product in exchange for your data" that succeeded at serious scale.

Now, it's no longer even enough to simply pay for a product from just about any company. We must also consent to essentially being further exploited for the company's gain ever-after.

There is a lot of discussion about dark UI patterns here and it's true that they are pervasive these days. Much of it is spawned by this customer-hostile "dark business model".

Replace the word "nothing" with "something" in this "300" clip and it pretty much sums up many company attitudes these days: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uHxIssSROjk

Such a pet peeve of mine, weasel-worded buttons. I remember the first time something gave me the option to “Archive” a thing but not “Delete” it...I stopped using the service after that. Also, usually their least favorite options do not even look like options (random non-button-like text off to the side or whatever).

Another atrocity is an alert with a “don’t ask again” check box, especially in something that is unnecessarily-modal (read: developer was lazy). Pro tip: if you think the user won’t want to see your message ever again then you need to redesign your system to keep the message from appearing even the first time.

> Another atrocity is an alert with a “don’t ask again” check box, especially in something that is unnecessarily-modal (read: developer was lazy). Pro tip: if you think the user won’t want to see your message ever again then you need to redesign your system to keep the message from appearing even the first time.

That one I think is rather sensible for permission requests from apps. "Do you want to share your location with this app? - Yes/No; [] don't ask again", where the tickbox serves to store the preference forever. An alternative would be "Yes, always"/"Only now"/"Not now but ask again later"/"Never". Not sure which one I’d prefer.

One issue for me is that it’s easy to check a box and then have no idea how to uncheck it later (or forget that you even can).

On/off switches for permissions seem sort of reasonable until you imagine dozens of apps and dozens of different kinds of permissions. In iOS for example all you get is pages and pages of toggle switches for all apps to allow/disallow cellular data, which is annoying to manage and has no intelligence in its design. They should have better defaults, such as automatically allowing all apps using less than some reasonable amount of data and automatically inhibiting the data-firehosing apps when you’re roaming. There’s a lot they could do. Asking the user, in general, is a cheap way to just not think through the problem.

The ones that make me rage is where they say something along the lines of "Opt out of ad tracking" then have a disclaimer that says something like "you're still going to get a bunch of ads, they will just suck worse".

How about just offering me an option to pay you to get rid of tracking and advertising?

> Just take a look at the language in UIs lately, it's gotten passive aggressive; instead of a polite "No thanks", our choices are now: "Maybe later".

Since that's how the “No, thanks” option was usually treated in the past, it's just truth-in-UI.

Not only "maybe later", no-buttons like "Instead of subscribing to this free and great newsletter I would like to continue my life uninformed and at a disadvantage for now (but I will definitely have a look later)" in in-page popups with that as the only way to close the modal have recently caught on.

These things make me despise the website instantly and make me wish for a "fuck off"-button.

Try cancelling your wordpress subscription if you want to see dark patterns in ui

It should be illegal to not allow you to cancel a paid subscriptions through the same means you started it. Tons of companies force you to call their customer support, get put on hold, listen to to them try and sell you stuff, listen to them try and convince you to stay, then finally let you cancel it.

Ever tried to cancel a gym membership?

When did this ethical issue happen? Up until a few years ago, my feeling was that hackers had the high horse regarding ethics, considering free software movement, crypto movements, etc.

Did hackers lose their ethics when money was poured in?

The answer is that the "hacker ethos" is just a masquerade with SV in order to try to persuade other professionals and conditon them to approve of such behavior and participate. Sure there's money at play, but the hacker ethos espoused by many SV startups and companies is lip service to appeal to potential candidates and vocal members of a said community. It's marketing, and regrettably people eat it up while thinking they're above such chicanery and tricks.

There are hackers outside the bay area and venture capital space.

Hackers do have the high horse. People working at Google, Facebook, Microsoft et al are not hackers, they're workforce in a corporate environment.

"Hackers" lost their ethics after an openly anti-ethics VC appropriated the label and gave it to his followers.

> They're not Goody Two-Shoes type good. Morally, they care about getting the big questions right, but not about observing proprieties. That's why I'd use the word naughty rather than evil. They delight in breaking rules, but not rules that matter.

If that quote doesn't scare you, imagine it coming from the mouth of the head of whichever political party you like less. Or whatever position you see as a cartoon bad guy (e.g. Wall Street CEO).

SV parades the hacker ethics like some serial killer who wears the faces of their victims to show everyone how pretty they are now.

What Google, Facebook, etc. wear as hacker ethic is so divorced from some of the principles that it's just cruel.

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