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Comment by tayo42 | Hacker News Reader

It's so bad I think this needs to be done with legislation. I wish I could write laws.

What exactly needs to be done with legislation? There should be a law to ensure you turn off the notifications on Facebook?

Ensure that we don't get pointless notifications that exist only to increase engagement and have these on by default. Take advantage of feelings of fomo. You ever actually go turn off notifications? They have obscure names and there's tons of them in some apps. I don't want to waste time and energy fighting back apps constantly. Healthy defaults to start with

The best bet you can get is something like App Store guideline rather than law, I think.

Why? It’s our government (in theory), no reason we shouldn’t make laws to the benefit of the people.

When the private sector consistently refuses to self regulate bad behavior, the law can and should step in.

It should, but doesn't, when the private sector has bought the public sector.

Eh. If the EU can make a law requiring every website to make me click through a popup regarding the types of strings my browser will put in the `Cookie` header, I think the US can make a law requiring every app to let me choose what types of notifications it sends me.

Legislation that defers to regulations?

Even worse are the phantom notifications that don't come from an obvious application. No clue what's getting chimed about.

Ads via notifications should be regulated.

For example, I have notifications enabled for Amazon because I need to know when a delivery is coming but they’ll use that channel to spam me about “deals”. There’s no reasonable way to disable all these ad-via-notifications.

Are you sure? I just checked my device, and while all notifications are toggled under a catch-all "notifications" category, I am able to customize this from within the app, and shipment notifications are their own category.

“Reasonable” is doing some heavy lifting, but i just spent another 10 minutes hunting through all the in-app settings menus I could find and I haven’t found a way to disable these alerts.

They certainly don’t want you to disable deal notifications and make it very difficult to do so.

It’s like the old quote about fire extinguishers: if you don’t know where one is, it doesn’t exist. If a reasonable effort cannot find the setting, it doesn’t exist.

Hm, I'm sorry to hear you wasted your time. There was a shortcut directly to the in-app notification settings directly from the android app notification settings.

There should be a basic right of people to control their own “attention” akin to posting a private property sign.

All notifications on iOS are opt in now. The problem is already solved.

Isn't this just like browser." This app wants to send notifications?"

I'm saying irrelevant stuff like recommendations should never be sent. If I click yes to the above question I should only get relevant notifications.

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