Comment by mjparrott

7 hours ago

Imagine making this argument for other technologies. There is no opt-out button for machine learning, choosing the power source for their datacenters, the coding language in their software, etc. Conceptually there is a difference between opting out of an interaction with another party vs opting out of a specific part of their technology stack.

The three examples you listed are implementation details, so it's not clear if this is a serious post. Which datacenter they deploy code in is (other than territory for laws etc, which is something you may wish to know about and pick from) an implementation detail.

A better example would be: imagine every single operating system and app you use adds spellcheck. They only let you spell check in American[1]. You will get spell check prompts from your Operating System, your browser, and the webapp you're in. You can turn none of them off.

[1] in this example, you speak the Queen's English, so spell color colour etc

  • Unrelated but interesting to think about terms like "queens English" now that the queen is gone. Will we be back to kings English some day? I suppose the monarchy might stay too irrelevant to bother changing phrases.