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Comment by AdmiralAsshat | Hacker News Reader

There needs to be some kind of codified Consumer Bill of Rights that says, in effect, "We paid for your product. You do not get to monetize us further after the point of sale."

Companies could then signal whether they agree to adhere to that code of conduct or not, and use it as a selling point for consumers to tell, at a glance, whether they want to support said company or not.

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I would settle for aggressive sandboxing built into the OS. Something that tells me, "This application has permission to run full-screen, play audio, and contact the network. You may revoke these permissions individually. It cannot run invisibly in the background. It cannot read your files."

The tracking from Red Shell would be very hard to stop at the OS-level, because the things they're gathering are all stuff that has legitimate relevance to the game (e.g. the game may want to know what CPU, RAM, and videocard you have for recommended settings). Further, an internet connected game needs an internet connection to work.

So it would be very hard for the OS to tell the game, "You can send packets about the player's current position in the gameserver, but you can't send packets back to the software developer that contain fingerprint information." The developer would just encrypt the info and send it all to the same destination to make all packets look the same.

I think people are less concerned about hardware specs and more concerned about cataloging of software installed, logging DNS traffic, and capturing PII.

What do you do when the OS itself is spyware? There's a reason vendors like requires all Android vendors to install Google apps on phones, because all their apps (especially Play Services) has every possible permissions enabled by default and it's not possible for consumers to disable it. Windows 10 too is ridden with telemetry and all the 'spyware options' (ex. send my keystrokes to the cloud) are enabled by default.

Calling it a "codified Consumer Bill of Rights" makes it sound like you want it to be a law, but the second half of your statement makes it sound like you want it to be like the "certified humane" label on the eggs that I buy.

I have no problem with it being an optional label, but I see no reason it should be enforced legally.

Yeah, maybe not the best naming convention. It might be easier to call it a "reverse privacy policy": what we want you to do with our data.

I envision the agreement would be non-binding--it would simply be a list of things we the Consumers want our companies to agree to. The companies can then say yes, we agree to follow your guidelines (perhaps introduce some third party to "certify" that the guidelines have been followed if companies start lying about it).

In the EU, we call it GDPR.

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