Don't do things without my consent!!! How hard is it for Silicon Valley to understand this very simple concept?
Every NTP session leaks time desync information, which reveals—on modern hardware—relativistic travel, including long airplane trips.
Every software update leaks a fortune about what you run and when you connect.
I don’t think it’s reasonable to ask that people consent to these; I don’t think they can. I absolutely agree that photo metadata is different and at a way higher level of the stack.
Should Apple insist that every end user consents to the user agent string sent on every HTTP request?
You've succinctly identified a (maybe the) huge problem in the computing world today. Computers should not do anything without the user's command/consent. This seems like a hopeless and unachievable ideal only because of how far we've already strayed from the light.
Even Linux, supposedly the last bastion of user control... it's a mess. Do a fresh install and type ps ax at a shell. You'll see dozens of processes in the background doing god knows what. I didn't consent to any of this! The distribution's maintainer simply decided on my behalf that I want the computer to be running all these processes. This is totally normalized!
I don't expect my computer to ask for consent again and again for every byte sent over the network, but I do expect it to obtain my consent before generally accessing the network and sending bytes over the network.
To me, there's never been a case, except maybe in the first decade or so of the hobby/tinkering PC movement, where most users had this ability.
Should we just not use computers?
I don't think "should we just give up?" is a reasonable question to anything.
And getting downvoted for saying it, which is a fascinating incongruity.
Or signal of non-named stakeholders.
If the world was a nightclub, “Silicon Valley” would be a creepy guy who walks up to every woman and says “You’re now dating me. To stop, you need to opt out using a form that I will do my best to make sure you can’t read.”
Choosing an Apple product is consent to trusting Apple. Continued use their products represents ongoing consent. This is an objective fact about all complex connected devices and it cannot possibly be otherwise.
Yes you did. You purchased a computer, put this software on it and executed it. If you didn't want it to do whatever it's doing you should have determined what it would do beforehand and chose not to do it.
Even assuming that running the software implies my consent (which I would dispute), how do I make the decision about whether I should execute the software if I don't know what it is doing?
This all-or-nothing approach is also problematic. I should not have to allow the developer free rein to do whatever he wants, as a condition of using the software. This is why operating systems are slowly building granular permissions and consent checks.
I agree that all-or-nothing is problematic but even with a flexible permission system the best you can hope for is for all the things apps do to be itemized and set to sane defaults. But even then sanity is subjective. For every person like you (and me fwiw) who values privacy there are 1000 people who will never find the settings, don't care about privacy, and will wonder why stuff isn't working.
Ultimately privacy is similar to security in that it comes down to trust. If you don't trust your OS you're screwed. Your choices are try to exert as much control over it as possible, or don't use it.
How would that make any difference in this case? Presumably, you'll have long-ago checked the "allow general access to the network" setting, so you've given consent to the "send my photo data" action. Heck, surely connecting to the internet in the first place is implicit consent that you want to send stuff over the network?
Sure, you can ask users "do you want to use this". But why do we ask that? Historically it's user consent (knowingly opting in), and legal requirements around privacy. We don't have that pop up on any random new feature, it's gated to ones with some risk. There are questions to ask: does this technical method have any privacy risk? Can the user make informed consent? Again: I'm not pitching we ditch opt-in (I really don't have a fix in mind), but I feel like we're defaulting too quickly to "old tools for new problems". The old way is services=collection=consent. These are new privacy technologies which use a service, but the privacy is applied locally before leaving your device, and you don't need to trust the service (if you trust the DP/HE research).
End of the day: I'd really like to see more systems like this. I think there were technically flawed statements in the original blog article under discussion. I think new design methods might be needed when new technologies come into play. I don't have any magic answers.
Such as?
You're an Apple employee?
You're presenting it as if you have to explain elliptic curve cryptography in order to toggle a "show password" dialogue but that's disingenuous framing, all you have to say is "Allow Apple to process your images", simple as that. Otherwise you can argue many things can't possibly be made into options. Should location data always be sent, because satellites are complicated and hard to explain? Should we let them choose whether they can turn wifi on or off, because you have to explain IEEE 802.11 to them?
Then don’t run someone else’s software on your device. It’s not your software, you are merely a licensee. Don’t delude yourself that you are morally entitled to absolute control over it.
The only way to have absolute control over software is with an RMS style obsession with Free software.
Want a phone that doesn’t spy on you? Make it yourself. If you can’t, find some like-minded people and incentivise them (with money or otherwise) to make it for you. If they can’t (or won’t) perhaps contemplate the possibility that large capitalist enterprises might be the only practical way to develop some products.
To suggest that customers are "morally entitled" to a Samsung phone with zero tracking and zero telemetry is similarly absurd. If you don't like Samsung's product, don't buy it.
Why not? What gives McD the right to make such a decision unilaterally, other than might?
In fact, this is how disability legislation (for example) already tends to work. You don't get to tell disabled people to just go somewhere else, you have to make reasonable accomodations for them.
This cannot be a serious question.
Restaurant have a legal obligation to warn the customers. AKA "opt-in" which is NOT what Apple is doing. And it's the whole issue with their behavior.
All consumers can engage in is Info Wars style paranoia, and grandstanding about the aforementioned paranoia.
We can regulate these problems.
If the EU can regulate away the lightning connector they can regulate away this kind of stuff.
No EU regulation could regulate away all "moral" concerns over software. More specifically, they EU could regulate, but the overwhelming majority of software companies would either strip significant features out for EU customers, or exit the market altogether.
This isn't rocket surgery.
I mostly agree. I'm just annoyed "this new privacy tech is too hard to explain" leads to "you shouldn't do it". This new privacy tech is a huge net positive for users.
Also: from other comments sounds like it might have been opt-in the whole time. Someone said a fresh install has it off.
It's a positive compared to doing the same "feature" without the privacy tech. It's not necessarily a positive compared to not forcing the "feature" on the user at all.
The privacy tech isn't necessarily a positive as a whole if it leads companies to take more liberties in the name of "hey you don't need to be able to turn it off because we have this magical privacy tech (that nobody understands and may or may not actually work please don't look into it too hard)".
I'm asking: what does an opt in for that really look like? You're not going to be able to give the user enough info to make an educated decision. There's ton of risk of "privacy washing" ("we use DP" but at very poor epsilon, or "we use E2E encryption" with side channel data gathering).
There's no easy answer. "ask the user", when the question requires a phd level understanding of stats to evaluate the risk isn't a great answer. But I don't have another one.