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Comment by achrono | Hacker News Reader

Ignoring the checkbox is an utterly offensive move, but repeatedly manipulating it contrary to stated consumer intent is a whole other level. I didn't know we were supposed to take 'frontier' literally in every sense of the word.

I have now witnessed this myself after not believing this at first. Of course, screenshots etc. will hardly prove anything. This needs a proper third-party audit!

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Oh they aren't a frontier on this. Undoing user configuration is well tested in Windows land.

This is a problem everywhere, Apple does the same thing on MacOS by reverting privacy/security grants to apps

Reverting... to on? I've seen some stuff in Apple-land where I'm pretty sure it went back to the default option after an update but I've never seen anything get granted more permissions.

No, like specific apps that have been granted full disk access etc lose their permissions. It’s hell for IT, constantly breaks AV. I would not characterize that as reverting to a default. More often it’s a breaking change for how the security model works that ends up requiring reauthorization

Ah, sure, it's annoying but it's never giving new permissions you didn't give it before. And yes "revert to default" is probably not what's happening, but reverting to forcing a specific permission grant when the existing one was superceeded or replaced.

Fair, it’s still an example of them not respecting user configuration

I understand the rationale. The app you granted full disk access three months ago might have significantly changed. You can't reset the permissions for a given app after every update, as you might end up prompting the user three times per week.

The alternative would be keeping a permission granted for an app that might have had an update introducing nefarious behavior, whether intentional or not.

Annoying yes, but least bad.

"Remember my choice", right?:)

Linkedin, Amazon and others have gotten around this by adding a "new" feature, default on. I've gone into privacy settings where everything is unchecked, except a newly added checkbox.

This is apparently enough to hold up the broadly-accepted fiction that its possible to use these services while maintaining privacy and without risk. There's a huge industry of hosting services to handle the needs companies who compete with the primary cloud providers, who can't afford the IP and competitive risk.

OpenAI was caught directly stealing from apple, asking employees to bring in their laptops. Its a polite fiction that companies aren't trying to gain any advantage over the other. There's no effective consequence, and even if they get caught red handed they can litigate for decades.

You know what they'll say in their defense. "This is an extremely complicated systems, and we apologize that a technical solution was broken in an intricate way. [Insert boilerplate about taking privacy seriously here]"

These companies need to burn.

Somehow it never fails the other way...

Pirating copyrighted works is absolutely illegal in most jurisdictions, but pirating every single copyrighted work in the world is somehow exempt from law.

We can't apply plebeian laws or ethics to our benevolent overlords, they are above our worldly worries.

> Ignoring the checkbox is an utterly offensive move, but repeatedly manipulating it contrary to stated consumer intent is a whole other level.

I'm not sure why the second one is worse than the first one.

Wall, you can't tell if they're ignoring it, but it's fairly easy to show they're manipulating it. So a cut-and-dry demonstration is worse than a strong suspicion.

One has to remember they're crooks through and through. They're doing it by retoggling the checkbox because it offers them plausible deniability.

"Oh, side effect of a recent update, silly us, we'll improve QA, sorry !".

Or "once again our all-powerful models got away from us ! they did it themselves, the little scamps".

Sounds more like implausible deniability.

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