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Comment by quotemstr | Hacker News Reader

I think that prohibiting user authorization of data access is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I approve of privacy, but at the end of the day, my data is my data, and part of data ownership is having the freedom to share my data with whomever I choose.

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That sounds nice in theory, but even as a highly technical user, I don't have any knowledge about what information apps actually gather about me.

I tend to assume they collect more than you'd think and are less effective at using it than you'd think.

That's precisely why the EU gave us GDPR. With it, the app has to provide you with that knowledge.

I think that's not the right way to look at it. You can still get copies of all your data, and share them with whoever you want however you want. The only thing Google's restricting is the ability to set up a seamless interface, because the lack of seams often tricks people into trusting third parties more than they should.

I'm not a fan of this recently-popular form of argument: "we're not banning X: we're just adding friction, so your arguments predicated on banning X are invalid". Support for a thing is continuous, not discrete. It ranges from full endorsement on one end of the spectrum to a total unrelenting ban on the other. The arguments against banning X also apply to adding friction to X, just to a lesser extent depending on how much friction we're talking about. If it didn't, you could defacto ban things by making them arbitratily difficult.

I still think there's a data sovereignty argument against the move we're discussing on this thread. That it's just friction makes the move less bad, but I think it's still bad.

> The only thing Google's restricting is the ability to set up a seamless interface, because the lack of seams often tricks people into trusting third parties more than they should.

The whole point of computing is being able to set up seamless interfaces for doing things you want done. It might be more secure that way, sure, but past some point security is opposite to utility. For me, it's just another reason I'm happy with moving my primary mail to FastMail on my own domain.

1) Maybe a solution could be to give power users an escape hatch with big red warnings that doing so voids any support or terms of service guarantees, sort of like how Apple allows non-signed apps, but not be default.

2) Even with a mechanism like the above, part of the issue with communication/social data like Gmail is that you can’t control your own privacy perimeter, because the other party could inadvertently leak your data through another app they connect

The user was already give a BIG RED WARNING when enabling that, but the media article titles were still:

"Gmail app developers have been reading your emails" (The Verge)

"Google admits it lets hundreds of other companies access your Gmail inbox" (Telegraph)

"Google's 'Dirty Secret' Allows Third Party Apps To Read Gmail Messages" (TechTimes)

And all those articles were accompanied by appropriate ravenous Google bashing on this very site.

What exactly do you expect a company to do if the developers of HN and the "educated" tech media attacks it for having an open API?

That’s why I laugh when people ask Twitter to have an open API for developers again. The press would act the same way for clicks.

> the other party could inadvertently leak your data through another app they connect

In snail mail, a sent letter becomes the property of the recipient, and the recipient can do whatever he wants with it. Why should email be different? We're not talking about a static "profile" like Facebook has, but individual messages.

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