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Comment by xg15 | Hacker News Reader

> Microsoft does allow you many, many options to guard your privacy within Windows 10—but it’s also betting you won’t bother.

I think this sums up the issues I have with most of the discussions where "consumer choice" or "personal responsibility" are touted.

Yes, those are valid and important concepts - but if a company is emphasizing "choice" while at the same time having a vital interest that people "choose" against their own interests (or even manipulating people to that effect), the argument becomes obvious bullshit.

It's like food companies emphasizing "consumer choice" whenever stricter regulations are on the table, yet at the same time opposing anything that would actually allow consumers to make an informed choice (like easy to understand nutrition labels).

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Tracking/Telemetry should always be opt-in. Or at least like:

Do you want to send following data: <Data that will be collected,...> <legalese>:

Big font: NO Small font: Yes

This would be the fairest design for all. Users would be able to make informed consent, vendors get data on a moral good way.

They would just do what most web sites do, and ask users again and again, every day, multiple times per day until the user cracks and irrevocably opts in.

This is kind of how I felt when originally using Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.; sure they have dozens of “privacy settings” but (1) I did not really want to spend hours checking all the boxes a certain way, (2) they could change at any time, e.g. some awful new setting would invariably appear, naturally with an equally-awful default value (from the user’s point of view), and (3) there is no guarantee these things are coded correctly.

For (3), there’s a pretty good chance just from code rot that your “settings” may not always work. Certainly not if some company’s entire business model seems to depend on the more anti-consumer values for “settings”, you can bet they will not heavily invest in testing their accuracy.

And the real problem for privacy-related settings is that if they ever fail to protect you, even being buggy for just a short period of time, your information is then out there. Leaked. Gone. Even if you close the barn door, the animals have left. It is the type of software that has to be working 100% of the time to really protect data.

So I don’t really want privacy “settings”, I want privacy, period. That should be the default and only behavior, where the user has the only keys.

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