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Every attempt at providing the general public with an "informed consent" escape hatch to security or privacy features ends degrading to either consent fatigue or "misinformed consent" dark patterns.


What do you suggest, then? As users, does rent-seeking paternalism really serve us better in the long run?


The rent-seeking is fundamentally a separate issue from the paternalism. Lots of the anti-Apple lobbying and PR is drawing attention to the 30% fees, but for many of those companies, they care much more about winning the freedom to spy on their users or engage in other predatory or abusive business practices.

But aside from that, you cannot simply point people at the approach that led to Windows UAC and GDPR cookie consent banners and consider the problem adequately solved.


So you'd prefer that instead of the (rare) UAC prompt, Windows should simply refuse to do what the user asks, unless they pony up for a developer license?


No, but I think it's incredibly naive and shortsighted to suggest that we should impose a legal requirement that any platform adopt such an obviously imperfect approach. Your memories of Windows Vista may have faded, but UAC prompts were certainly not rare when UAC first showed up, and they're still common enough to cause consent fatigue and undermine their effectiveness as a security measure.




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