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Comment by vasdae | Hacker News Reader

It is not stealing anything because you get a dialog asking you for permission to do it. If you give someone permission to take something, they are not stealing it.

https://heise.cloudimg.io/v7/_www-heise-de_/imgs/18/4/3/3/1/...

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> It is not stealing anything because you get a dialog asking you for permission to do it

That dialog talks about sync but notably does not mention credentials at all.

Surely this is instance where informed consent is needed, with full disclosure of what's going to happen.

Something along the lines of: "this means your IMAP username and password will be passed to Microsoft where we will store it indefinitely so we can regularly log into your IMAP server to sync your messages".

Of course, users are less likely to consent if you explain exactly what's going to happen...

The dialog talks about needing to synchronize your email account. It then goes on to tell that contacts and events are not synchronized. No one will reasonably suspect your authentication credentials are send to Microsoft. Such reasoning of this dialog will never fly in a German court.

When I saw that I immediately cancled my the "new outlook" tryout and wrote in the feedback form I don't want my mails in the microsoft cloud.

At least in the EU it is.

Explained in detail, here.

https://gdpr.eu/gdpr-consent-requirements/

Consent must be specific, informed, freely given and unambiguous. The user must be able to revoke consent at any time, as easy as it was providing the consent before.

Very clearly the Microsoft "consent" info does not tick any single one of those items.

Illegal.

Or, in other words:

There is much to criticize about the EU. But where the US has brought the world "By farting during installation of this software you consent to us stopping by and taking your first born child" kind of EULAs / "choices", EU's GDPR is forcing big tech to treat humans as humans again (instead of just data).

I don't know why political entities are brought into these conversations other than for some sense of high-horsedness or a figurative pissing contest.

GPDR is good. So is CCPA, COPRA, etc. Meanwhile, both the EU and the US have plenty of predatory legislation that allows companies to do all kinds of fucked up things.

Because nuance is valuable? "GDPR is good" doesn't remotely address its strengths and failings, nor the conflicting incentives and motivations that produced it.

I agree that there's no room for home-team mentality here, but we should absolutely assign credit and blame where it's due, especially when those of us who don't live in a jurisdiction with such a law gain some halo-effect benefit.

Sure, but that's the point. It's assigning credit/blame to the legislation in question.

Not some arbitrary lines on the ground that also have terrible anti-legislation.

My comment wasn't meant as a pissing contest. It's not me who has created GDPR, I did not have a choice of getting born in the EU, it just happened :)

But I am pretty impressed that in these days where most regulations for pretty much everything are defined by lobbyists, GDPR actually did happen, ended up to be a very reasonable set of rules, and actually gets enforced. It was written well, and unlike with other regulations it's not full of loop holes.

Laws and regulations created to the sole benefit of your general population is just something you can't take for granted these days anymore. Therefore, for me GDPR is kind of magic.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/informed_consent

Is it asking for informed consent for a change when the ui encourages and defaults to not keeping the system quo

> It is not stealing anything because you get a dialog asking you for permission to do it

Also, at least according to several comments on nearly any story about movie piracy, it is not stealing because all they have done is made a copy.

I disagree. I think that you can’t consent to something you don’t know about and certainly not something you don’t understand. This includes every single eula that everyone agrees to without reading. In my opinion that is not an agreement, as an agreement requires informed consent.

Unfortunately our legal system strongly disagrees with me but that’s my two cents

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