Hacker News Reader

Imagine making this argument for other technologies. There is no opt-out button for machine learning, choosing the power source for their datacenters, the coding language in their software, etc. Conceptually there is a difference between opting out of an interaction with another party vs opting out of a specific part of their technology stack.

View on HN

The three examples you listed are implementation details, so it's not clear if this is a serious post. Which datacenter they deploy code in is (other than territory for laws etc, which is something you may wish to know about and pick from) an implementation detail.

A better example would be: imagine every single operating system and app you use adds spellcheck. They only let you spell check in American[1]. You will get spell check prompts from your Operating System, your browser, and the webapp you're in. You can turn none of them off.

[1] in this example, you speak the Queen's English, so spell color colour etc

Unrelated but interesting to think about terms like "queens English" now that the queen is gone. Will we be back to kings English some day? I suppose the monarchy might stay too irrelevant to bother changing phrases.

They’re already calling it the Kings Birthday public holiday in Australia and it just seems wrong.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com