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Comment by imajoredinecon | Hacker News Reader

Is it just me, or is the wording hugely misleading?

> To opt-out from our anonymization of your personal information to perform data analyses, please provide your Mastercard or Maestro payment card number

What we're opting out from is the use of the data, right?

I guess the charitable interpretation is that this was written by somebody incompetent, not by someone trying to be deliberately obfuscatory...

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Its the banking industry: it is intentionally misleading/ They've gotten in trouble for it a number of times and even when the Obama administration cracked down on it, they eventually learned how to legally make their fine print incomprehensible again after a few years.

This post contains some strong statements. Some are likely not verifiable here ("it is intentionally misleading"), but others ("the Obama administration cracked down on it") deserve sources, even if well attested -- they're not common knowledge.

That's a good point, those contain assumptions that need some backing up because they might not hold up water, even if it's the common perception in politics of American culture.

But otherwise it probably comes down to occams razor and they had some random corporate web guy half-ass the copy on the website which they aren't investing any sort of high quality resources.

It's easy to mistake poor workmanship or miss information as some sort of purposeful evasion.

Hell, another scenario is the lawyers gave it a run by an neutered the text in an effort to make it non-liable and no-one decided to make it readable again.

Not that I like defending these monopolies. Just some better understanding of how things like this work IRL over the years.

I can assure you that many lawyers worked on some boilerplate Ts&Cs that were applied here or that many lawyers reviewed the language on this specific page rather than a “random web guy”.

You should look up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

I'm still pissed at Obama for not making Warren the chair of it.

She's no more qualified than any other Masshole when it comes to dutifully towing the party line[1] and but she was uniquely qualified to head the CFPB and shouldn't have been passed over for that.

[1] Which is basically all she's done in congress but as someone who was a republican until they stopped being fiscally conservative and who studied markets and fought for the little guy all her life who can blame her for being a little tepid on some of the fiscally wilder things that come out of the Bernie/AOC crowd and the jackboot-ier things that come out of the authoritarian neoliberal old guard.

> To opt-out from our anonymization of your personal information

Doesn’t opting out from anonymization mean opting in for PII?

Hah!

I bet in the mind of a bank exec, it may very well. An amusing point.

There are laws in some countries preventing this, but your point is entirely valid and even makes me wonder about opting out.

Heeeey, wait a minute, is this some banking MILDEC type scenario? Who are you? (j/k)

Pretty obvious to me that this text being misleading is deliberate. Certainly went through some expensive lawyers to get it just barely defensible enough.

Even Apple makes opting out of sharing data with advertisers (IDFA) confusing[0]

> Allow apps to ask permission to track you across apps and websites owned by other companies.

[0] https://blog.gingerlime.com/2020/does-ios-14-protect-your-pr...

If Apple made that say “allow apps to track you” and everyone set it to off and they didn’t mention that apps that don’t ask will still try to track you they’d be exposing themselves to a lawsuit when a company tracked Apple users without the IDFA.

I think it could be better stated, but changing to to “allow apps to track you” would not be a setting they could actually offer.

Yeah I’m sure plenty of lawyers laboured over this thing... Still doesn’t make it easy to understand. I think they could say that they (Apple) does not allow to track you, and they won’t facilitate tracking, but if an app does this covertly and without Apple’s blessing, it’s on the app and not on Apple. Of course that would put Apple on the line. Apple claims to care about privacy, but apprently not enough :)

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