Comment by AlexandrB
2 years ago
I hate the periodic location permission prompts on iOS. Big tech companies are increasingly paternalistic with this stuff, like their users are all idiots who need to be managed like little children. Some other examples I've recently encountered:
- 1Password requires supplying a password hint when changing the master password.
- Unifi OS enforcing password quality requirements even when locally/self hosted.
- "Set up later" (instead of "No") as the negative option for various "helpful" feature prompts in iOS.
It’s worth keeping in mind that in the case of Apple platforms, a lot of this has roots in the revelation a decade and change ago that third party software on mobile platforms can and will exploit every affordance the operating system offers to extract data, often silently. It’s no different on desktop OSes, but users have been more acclimated to it there since full blown access to everything has been the norm there longer than it hasn’t.
That said I can certainly see the argument that Apple isn’t going about handling this set of problems correctly, but ignoring it or pretending it doesn’t exist isn’t right either.
> It’s no different on desktop OSes, but users have been more acclimated to it there since full blown access to everything has been the norm there longer than it hasn’t.
This is a problem with proprietary software markets in particular. You can largely escape this dilemma if you source your software from a free software distribution like a Linux distro, Conda, Pkgsrc, F-Droid, etc., because they have their own processes and standards for curating, vetting, categorizating and sometimes even patching software.
One of the reasons that desktop Linux has lagged with app sandboxing and binary attestation compared to macOS is that proprietary apps are marginal and few on most Linux desktops. Linux users are not choosing the bulk of their software from a giant pile of borderline malicious shitware like users of mobile apps generally are. (It's a good thing that Linux is catching up in this respect because some proprietary crap, like Discord, Google Chrome, VSCode, Steam, and Zoom, is extremely sticky for new users coming from proprietary operating systems where proprietary apps are the norm as well as strongly incentivized by powerful network effects. Vendors of such software have proven that they can't be trusted to follow reasonable conventions with DEB or RPM repositories, and Flatpak will suits untrustworthy vendors and other third parties better.)
> I can certainly see the argument that Apple isn’t going about handling this set of problems correctly, but ignoring it or pretending it doesn’t exist isn’t right either.
Apple is understandably prioritizing the realities of the ecosystems that the bulk of their existing users navigate, namely one of publishers selling software as commodities and services for financial profit. But it's not the only conceivable path forward because not all ecosystems of usable software are dominated by producers facing such incentives. You can answer the proprietary hellscape by stepping away from it instead of letting yourself be hampered by shit like this on your own machine.
Most people would not have an easy time completely eliminating proprietary software from day to day usage. Reducing the amount of it is certainly possible (though may come with caveats WRT ease of use/UX; F-droid for example is not fun to try to comb through to find the good bits), but some amount is going to linger even if it’s just games the user plays to blow off some steam at the end of the day.
Even if full-FOSS were practical, I’d still want robust sandboxing and permissions to help limit the blast radius if some malicious executable manages to find its way in and to feel confident that nothing is poking around where it shouldn’t be. There’s not really a good reason for everything to have access to everything except for convenience.
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>like their users are all idiots who need to be managed like little children
Most are.
But the OSes could be designed way better for this stuff too.
Give the user security but also total visibility. A central place to grant/revoke app permissions, and to check what all apps ask for, click to see their "privacy policy" or lack thereof, has an easy way to filter to see e.g. "which apps use the camera, when they last used it", etc.
When some app is blocked and you wonder why it doesn't work, it should be easy to see a list of "blocked apps" and sort them by "when they were blocked" and other such things.
> "Set up later" (instead of "No") as the negative option for various "helpful" feature prompts in iOS.
I'm OK with this. When the prompt appears, you're very much trying to do something else, and ya don't need the detour. "Bug me l8r plz."
I'm not; it's passive-aggressive. Any dialogue of the form "Yes"/"Ask Later" is a framing that prevents you from saying "No, go away forever, I don't want this ever".
Agreed. But this type of dialog rarely has three choices.