Comment by buran77
5 years ago
> requiring explicit permission
Except on the long term that would have no effect in empowering users. We all know that when faced with a deluge of permission requests, or pressured by the fact that enough people have already accepted and it's the entry price to collaborate, people will just hit accept and be done with it.
They only need to get the foot in the door and then you'll find that plenty of stuff ends up conditioned on you giving them access. Every one of these APIs is a Trojan horse. Past experience just proves that they will be hijacked for purposes that don't do the user any favors.
Look no further than JS which is there to enrich the web to benefit users but 99% of it is garbage slid under the door to benefit site owners. That's because plenty of things that should work just fine without it are now tied into it, disable JS and the site experience breaks.
> Except on the long term that would have no effect in empowering users. We all know that when faced with a deluge of permission requests, or pressured by the fact that enough people have already accepted and it's the entry price to collaborate, people will just hit accept and be done with it.
How is that any different from apps on the App Store?
The App Store can enforce things like "users can deny permissions and the app still works for anything else" or you get booted out of 50% of the US market. A web site can say "oh, you denied access to location? Well, I won't let you continue at all until you do". We saw this on Android - on install apps would require a raft of permissions, but if all your friends were on Facebook you'd be compelled to accept them all anyway.
A way this could be solved would be to provide websites with an interface that appears to be the system with no devices attached (or dummy devices in the case of devices that are always present, such as a power adapter) and only connect the real device when the user give permission. If the website thinks it has permission, but finds no device, it must have to fail gracefully or at the very least ask the user to connect a device (like a midi keyboard).
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My opinion is informed by my experience with JS.
I love the web that actual dynamic logic on the frontend has allowed. I want more of that, not less.
The alternative to web apps that can do these things is native apps that can do these things. If you don't think native apps are tracking your behavior, you are sorely mistaken.
> I love the web that actual dynamic logic on the frontend has allowed.
I think you missed my point, I also truly love that 1% of useful stuff that JS brings and wouldn't want to lose the functionality. But I absolutely hate the other 99% which I have no control over or I have to jump through uMatrix hoops to control.
Let's put it another way. You probably love that electricians and plumbers exist to fix your stuff. But if once you let them in they could invisibly camp in any room of your house without you even knowing where they are and what they're doing, would you still open the door for them?
These APIs can either give you a relatively broad "Allow on this site" option, or they can flood you with granular choices. The first opens the door for them camping in bed with you. The second is like someone triggering your alarm every 5 seconds until you disable it. Accept all. Then they can camp in bed with you.
Doesn't your experience tell you the same?
> If you don't think native apps are tracking your behavior, you are sorely mistaken
You see, this is exactly what I meant. "Those guys are screwing you over so it's OK if these ones do too". This is how the "screw the user over" arms race happens where everybody tries to outdo the others with even more invasive techniques, and users take it because each is just a slight escalation from before. When native apps were adding these "features" someone loved them for one reason or another. Frog in hot water.
P.S. Example of how the innocent battery API access can be sold as "to save battery" and then repurposed to screw you over:
https://metro.co.uk/2019/09/27/uber-charge-battery-lower-107...
Unequal progress of privacy improvements on the web and app fronts does not make it okay to walk back progress on the web front just to provide API parity.
If the only way to have privacy is to nuke functionality, then I’d rather have the functionality.
Luckily you can have both, despite Apple wanting to pretend otherwise.
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Those EU "accepts cookies" boxes have done an amazing job at making people ignore every popup on the internet.
By this logic, permission prompts shouldn't exist at all. I think you're gonna have to provide proof for your "we all know" assertion, because I do not know that users will individually grant dozens of permissions on each site they visit.