Hacker News Reader

You can disable most of that stuff from the bios/efi, so you already can effectively opt out of those features. This would be enough for a harware-gdpr thingy I think...

View on HN

That's true -- I guess I hadn't been thinking of it from that perspective. There'd still be the problem of asking consumers to "opt out/in" of these features, of course. It's hard enough asking consumers to make informed decisions when it comes to "can we use your photos/track you online" -- now you'd be asking "do you want to run virtual machines/access encrypted content/etc.".

But I guess I'd appreciate the ability to turn more stuff on/off in the BIOS -- makes me think of the whole "dark silicon" notion (if I don't use my laptop for Netflix, can I disable the streaming encryption stuff to save battery life?).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com