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Comment by miki123211

1 day ago

It's not just the captchas either, the "this GPS app needs access to your location" or "this photo taking app wants access to your camera" style pop-ups don't help either.

If you learn once that clicking "deny" in a notification pop-up means your phone doesn't ring when your grandson calls you on Whats App, you won't be clicking "Deny" in those pop ups any more.

I genuinely don't know how to solve that problem, and I definitely see non-technical family members struggle with it.

The silly thing is, it was known before all these permission pop-ups were created that users will simply press "Yes", "OK", "Allow", "Agree", etc., on every dialogue they see simply in order to get rid of it. Many people -maybe even most people? - just see them as needlessly getting in the way of where they actually want to be.

So, given that we knew that, why the hell did we create more?

  • Because there’s no good alternatives IMO.

    Auto-deny leads to a lot of unexpected and broken behavior, and most users aren’t going to know where to go to enable that type of stuff.

    But auto-enable is even worse: because malicious actors can get permissions they shouldn’t. In fact, even with mainstream applications, most of the permissions they ask for they don’t need to operate - they’re just used for tracking and data exfiltration.

    So ask every time has been the solution and it works okay. iOS actually does a good job with this. For suspicious permissions, such as accurate location data all the time, it periodically re-prompts. It’s annoying, but it can catch a lot of suspect behavior. There’s shockingly little apps that need your exact location when the app isn’t open.