eveninghere@beehaw.org 8 months ago
This sounds like an exaggeration though.
To me it seems like these researchers are saying the switch is confusing and complicated. That is not to say that Apple secretly collect data after lying to their users.
The problem with Siri, first example, is more about Apple’s (characteristic) terminology garbage. Siri’s voice control has nothing to do with Siri’s search suggestion, yet they marketed both as Siri. Actually, you can turn them both off, but since the voice control is just called Siri, they confused their users.
That’s different from "collecting data even when supposedly disabled.
(Tbf, even if they were better termed, my mom would still manage to confuse herself… mo matter what Apple do, the average user won’t be able to turn off anything.)
That said, there’s no point trying to convince someone on the internet anyway, and so I don’t really know why I wrote this comment.
Maybe this research and language is intended to suggest that there is a point past which “confusingly and unintuitively designed” strongly resembles “intentionally deceiving”? We’re probably not going to get internal emails saying “make it complicated so that we can collect users’ data”.
Also, researchers don’t really control how university press departments write up their results. Even less so when they’re interviewed by media.
Maybe this research and language is intended to suggest that there is a point past which “confusingly and unintuitively designed” strongly resembles “intentionally deceiving”? We’re probably not going to get internal emails saying “make it complicated so that we can collect users’ data”.
This is Apple that pride themselves on UX. If they do it a certain way there is a reason, which is not always with the user’s interests in mind.
teawrecks@sopuli.xyz 8 months ago
Depends on whether you consider anti-patterns to be “lying”. If a normal user would reasonably think that data isn’t being collected based on the settings they chose, then is it dishonest for them to still be collecting data? Is it good enough for them to say “well we technically never said that disabling X disabled all the invasive functionality needed to do X.”
Zworf@beehaw.org 8 months ago
www.apple.com/privacy/ “Apple, that’s privacy”. That and then doing dark patterns, I consider that lying, yes.