Comment by jerf
1 day ago
My cynicism fails me on this matter... do I cynically believe that these companies keep deliberately and routinely re- or un-checking these checkboxes because of the obvious benefits of "whoopsie guess you allowed these after all"? Or do I cynically believe that they are just so completely incompetent and inept at the simple act of maintaining settings that there may be a number of these that are not entirely intentional? As evidenced by the number of other bugs and configuration failures and random settings changes on update I see in other places? Sure, these sorts of settings sure seem to get spontaneously flipped more often than the other ones but they aren't the only settings I've seen get nuked on updates.
Now, obviously, considered as a whole, I think we're looking at "both". But when I wonder about specific cases like this one, that doesn't help.
Oh no… OpenAI, the company who encourages and instructs Apple employees on how to get them data on apple products when they accept an offer?
Interestingly your cynicism does not seem to account for OP?
I actually found my setting was enabled today when I know it was disabled before, so I’m inclined to agree with OP. I just think it was worth mentioning that there are other cynical takes you seem to have left out.
"Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice"
“Autoplay” and YouTube case in point:
- Autoplay transitioned to a per-device setting… suddenly default-on on every new device you log in to.
- Watching a video with computer-to-TV account connection? Automatic “TV queue,” a concept absent from the TV app, with incomprehensible behavior for how it’s used, so now videos are auto-played anyway.
- Watching a video from a playlist? Autoplay cannot be turned off.
Is it simply bad/absent product management and product design? Or is it actively user-hostile decisions meant to prop up view numbers and continue to have the users hooked on YouTube?
Yeah this could just be some vibeslop doing normal computer stuff. AI agents are famously incompetent at reasoning about database transactions. This seems like the sort of failure you get when you try to do distributed systems without knowing how--brings us back to the early mongodb days. Or it could be deliberate. Or, as you say, both.
Either way, is this a company you want to trust with intimate secrets? "Oh, but they passed SOC2!" Lol.