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Comment by dessant | Hacker News Reader

The constant nagging when you tell Google "no" shows how little respect they have for their users. Messages by Google, which is primarily an SMS app, is asking me every 1-2 weeks to enable RCS chats. The link for declining the request is small and easy to miss, while the AGREE button below it takes up 25% of the area of the popup.

Dear Google UX designers, the way you present your little "decline" links is illegal in the EU. I'm sure you've got these design directives from a product manager, but you can still say "no" to breaking the law.

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I dislike how there's no complete open source RCS implementation, and after trying it out a few years ago, I now actively avoid it (I instead use QKSMS on Android)...

But I don't see the problem with the decline link and EU law?

AFAIK, most EU regulations are about tracking and consent in using your information...

In this case, you're already using a Google product (the Messages app), and Google is just (aggressively) nudging you to use extra features that they have shipped in their app. It doesn't follow that Google is definitely going to use more information to track you than it would've done before (though it could be possible, of course)

...of course, I fully agree that this doesn't embody their "respect the user" ethos, but frankly... If you worked on new features for your users, I think it's fair to nudge them to try to make sure that what you worked on will end up benefitting them (of course, a company behaves differently than an individual, and it's not guaranteed that the work done might actually have merit... But that's orthogonal to this discussion)

Personal data is shared with Google and the carrier, that's why they need to ask for consent to enable the feature.

Here's the consent popup: https://imgur.com/a/PIqcDgR

The design of such consent popups has been deemed illegal in the EU, Google was also previously fined [1] for a similar consent popup. The "REJECT" button needs to be just as accessible and needs to have about the same visual weight as the "ACCEPT" button, dark patterns like the ones you see in the RCS consent popup above are illegal.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/7/22871719/france-fines-goog...

>> (I instead use QKSMS on Android)...

"Honestly, the days of any third-party SMS app are numbered."[0]

[0] I asked Signal motivations for SMS removal: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33258684

> Dear Google UX designers, the way you present your little "decline" links is illegal in the EU. I'm sure you've got these design directives from a product manager, but you can still say "no" to breaking the law.

If there is one thing like about EU, is that it's the only one in the world standing for the user's rights keeping these companies with their antitrust pratices in check.

If it weren't for them @pple wouldn't have switched to USB-C

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