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Comment by xethos | Hacker News Reader

Agreed, but this was search and watch history. I can see an argument for not keeping search history, but if I'm paying for Spotify, YouTube, or Netflix, I'd like to go back to that song or video I enjoyed last week but can't recall the name of

In other words, this is data we as consumers want to be able to access, and therefore want kept.

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It doesn’t have to be synced to the cloud though. Even if you want it on multiple devices, if the tech industry decided to try just a little bit you’d have a cross device, local store sync solution. But there’s money to be made from tracking so it gets stored on hackable cloud servers.

I was thinking the other day that people have forgotten that end-user data confidentiality is relatively simple, generally speaking, but we have built the wrong infrastructure (so far).

> but if I'm paying for Spotify, YouTube, or Netflix, I'd like to go back to that song or video I enjoyed last week but can't recall the name of

Surely this is up to the client, or perhaps explicit bookmarking capabilities. Not implicit records of what you looked for in the past

You CAN turn off watch history in Youtube (not sure about Spotify). However, for better or worse revealed preferences seem to show that people prefer automatic content recommendations over doing the search & bookmark work themselves.

Is it a revealed preference or is it an inevitable result of making the UX to turn it off hidden, frustrating to use, and come with unwanted side effects?

If companies actually think "users really, really want X" then they should have no fear making X opt-in.

All for privacy, but if you have Watchtube that has worse, less relevant personalization by default and Viewtube with better, more personalization by default, my guess is Viewtube will win the day with users

Some things need to be opt in but most things don't. What makes sense to have which way is not as simple as saying "if people wanted it, they'd configure it that way". Imagine how many problems having to opt in to keeping recent files or whatever on each program you use on all of your devices would be. Apart from the annoyance of setting it up, the annoyance of forgetting to set that (among a dozen other opt-ins) on one of your dozens of programs and finding out only when you can't remember the name of the document you had open yesterday. Most people would "opt in" to use a provider which has what most consider "sane" defaults instead.

But there are obviously MANY things we prefer to keep opt-in. E.g. sharing my recents data with 3rd party advertises. No need to throw the baby out with the bath water and make every service awful by default just to have a universal rule to quote though.

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