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Comment by vouaobrasil | Hacker News Reader

> Every user would just check that option and press yes.

Not if it's available in the developer options, or has more other sorts of friction to check the box. Or if it has a red warning label with the phrase "may increase the chance of hackers stealing your data and impersonating you".

One just has to make it unattractive enough to most.

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I think we saw how well this approach worked with the cookie popups post GDPR. It doesn't really work. At this point I feel most people have some idea of how their data is used and sold and if they continue to use Meta apps, its because they think the tradeoff is worth it. There are either no alternatives or strong network effects that make Instagram, Facebook, Whatsapp etc a worthwhile choice in many cases and we know it.

The problem with the cookies thing though is that it didn't mandate that websites should work well WITHOUT cookies. The cookie popups aren't bad but often the only option is "necessary cookies". We should have a "no cookies" option, too.

That would address a very different need, though: accessibility vs. data protection.

There are necessary cookies for sites to operate. For example, you need a cookie for authentication or a server-side e-commerce basket.

True. But those sites should only enable them when you decide to create an account/login.

Sadly, I think you're right. I recently got one of those "Can we share your data with our partners" popups and the number of partners it declared (in a tiny font) was... *1,583*. People either do not notice this stuff or just do not care.

This is the heart of the issue though. Most users don't care unless you purposefully go out of your way to scare them with enough melodrama and dark patterns as to border on outright dishonesty. It's not an issue of them being informed, they just genuinely do not care about the risk when the actor is a familiar megacorp because their viewpoint is that if billions of dollars can't keep the data safe then it was never going to be genuinely safe anyway.

And of course - often apps ask for permissions they don't need at opprotune time ie "enable development mode to get 100 more gems" or "enable notifications to use this app"

Especially if the person already uses Messenger or WhatsApp for personal conversations etc. Meta already has control over their important data at that point (chat logs and phone calls, probably location history). What more could be on the device other than web browsing and photos. It's the same thing with trusting Microsoft or Google - they already have access to all your data via control of the entire operating system and could in theory do anything with it. So users have to trust them to psychologically be ok with using those devices at all.

If that is truly a foregone conclusion then we should eradicate the megacorps, not pander to them or negotiate with them.

Why? Not philosophically why but genuinely why? The consumer isn't less for their choice, if they saw people suffering damage they found concerning they'd actually be hesitant. And at the same time it's not like equivalent open solutions are going to emerge, we've had decades of cyber-activist products meant to 'empower' users by providing similar functionality to the commercial products of their time and they almost never catch on and if they do they reach a critical mass where they just evolve into data hungry companies themselves. If users would rather pay with data than money maybe the right solution is just to make sure there's simply an opt-in point at all rather than implementing some pointless thicket of UI weeds for them to wade through just to make their device do what they want.

1. Corporations are too powerful and responsible for too much tragedy of the commons, especially with regard to global trade.

2. The end goal of corporations is ultimate wealth concentration and the destruction of local economies.

3. Corporations combined with technology means too much technological growth at too fast a pace

The world would be better off without the biggest 10 of them for sure.

If a user wants to turn on a clearly labeled setting to share a bunch of data with Meta, it should not be Apple's role to stop them even if you and I might think that's a stupid thing to do. Android's solution for more dangerous permissions is to make the user open the settings app and pick the apps to grant it to from a list, which seems like the right amount of friction to kick people out of autopilot and make them actively decide whether that's something they want to do.

If it's anyone's job to limit how Meta can collect and use data despite the express consent of the user, it's governments, not Apple.

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