Comment by schroeding | Hacker News Reader

Comment by schroeding | Hacker News Reader

The votes seem... pretty useless for most products? :-D

For example, by the votes the Sony WF-1000XM3s[1] are 31% "half-creepy", 12% find them even "super creepy".

Why? Hot take, but IMO these headphones are as "not creepy" as it gets. You don't have to use the app, they work fine as is. The app doesn't need any permissions. Still, the majority find them at least "half-creepy".

Or this Canon Printer [2] here. It's... a printer? Which allows to print stuff from the cloud via your own device. (Discontinued) Google Cloud Print could be creepy for some, but the printer works fine without it, locally. The majority thinks "Yep, that's pretty creepy"? Or are they just voting with the default setting "half-creepy", without moving the slider? :-P

10%~30% "not creepy", 30% "half-creepy", 10% "very creepy" seems to be the default distribution of votes for all more or less harmless products. Maybe the default value of a vote should be "not creepy", not "half-creepy" :-D

[1] https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/sony-wf... [2] https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/canon-p...

Most modern printers are creepy AF. They constantly phone home their ink status etc. A lot of them apart set up helpful WiFi access points where anyone can connect and see what you've left on the scanner plate. HP I'm looking at you.

To to mention the watermarking and money detection stuff printers do in their drivers which users have no control over.

Good point, I forgot about those!

As if someone would try to photocopy notes on a $100 printer :P

A ton of the products have a plurality of "Half Creepy" votes. I suspect it's because people wanted to see the results and you have to vote to see them. Half-creepy is populated by default.

Fun idea, but I don't think there is much valuable information to glean from the ratings.

> Why? Hot take, but IMO these headphones are as "not creepy" as it gets.

It says so in the “Can it snoop on me?” section… for example the app tracks your location…

Which it has to do if you use the auto-switch modes or location modes function.

If you allow it to so that it can do location based profiles. You can not allow that feature and during the onboarding screens it asks if you want that feature.

Right, that explains why some users would vote for "creepy". But the information in this section is not really true. The user is not forced (or nudged / dark-patterned / etc) in any way to give those permissions.

Location: Yes, it can ask for the Location permission, but it does that only if the user explicitly wants it to do so, doesn't it? You have to activate "Adaptive Sound Control", and also explicitly activate location based ANC control. And then you still have to give it the permission in the operating system dialog.

Camera: You can make pictures of your ears to use some kind of strange "sound optimization", which only works with a few apps. Only then does it ask for the Camera permission, and it never uses / asks for it again afterwards.

So the information Mozilla provides is not really accurate, and that could skew the votes. I don't know if that's any better. :-D

Just my two cents, a product having an optional app at all makes me disinclined to buy it. It's not a strict disqualification, but it's definitely a negative to me. I really dislike when companies even suggest I install their apps, and prefer to do business with companies that don't do that. The best sort of company is one that doesn't even know what an app is.

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