Goods and products must adhere to regulations banning common wrongdoings. Safety standards, health standards, avoiding financial harm, but also privacy. With this I mean, you are absolutely right! Producers and/or sellers of products violating the standards of the society must be pursued! Common people have the convenience not knowing every and all big and small regulations setting the standards of the society when going into a shop buying gadgets or goods. Those active in a specific area must know the specifics of that area and adhere the rules. Should people be aware of radio emission standards when purchasing things working with electricity and validate themselves if the specific product will adere to those when used? Absolutely no! No chance of that. We, consumers, do not need to be aware and able to tell if some food from the grocery will harm people eating it but those should not be sold or produced in the first place. Same with other products in common - product related usual - situations, other rules, other aspects (here, privacy). Producers must know and avoid specific wrongdoings for the common use scenarios of that specific product.
Flock was not the problem. The acts of Ring was the problem (partnering with Flock and forcing opt-in, among many). People bought Ring, people return Ring.
When I researched a bank learning they want to use some third party never-herd-of identification service on me was the moment I knew I do not want to share any of my personal details and consumer habits with that so called bank. They do not care enough to pretend they keep all my data in-house.
I’ve got the feeling that it’s spreading and is soon to become the default.
Another banking app has failed to identify me a couple of times (I attribute it to iPhone 17’s front camera distortion) and fell back to the snail mail id code as a 2nd factor. It arrived only several business days later. Instead of just letting me use my own 2nd factor such as a TOTP device or a physical security key. But maybe there are some legal requirements for that flow, I’m out of the loop.
So there’s a whole range between passkey-is-enough on one end and outsourced video id or snail mail for 2nd factor on the other. The latter can of course be misused to siphon as much personal information as possible out of you, even linking and scraping your other banking accounts for consumer profiling - designed as a requisite part of the authentication/authorization flow.
I'd argue that the optimum was in long run to migrate to the standard version, that everyone (e.g. new employees) know. Replacing the usually particular (or even weird) way implemented own flavour.
I know, I know, long run does not exists in today's investor dominated scenarios. Code modernization is a fairytale. So far I seen no exception in my limited set of experiences (but with various codebases going back to the early 90's with patchy upgrades here and there, looking like and old coat fixed many many times with diverse size of patches of various materials and colour).
When I led C++ style/modernization for Chromium, I made this argument frequently: we should prefer the stdlib version of something unless we have reason not to, because incoming engineers will know it, you can find advice on the internet about it, clang-tidy passes will be written for it, and it will receive optimizations and maintenance your team doesn't have to pay for.
There are cases, however, when the migration costs are significant enough that even those benefits aren't really enough. Migrating our date/time stuff to <chrono> seemed like one of those.
And too many tech workers decided to rollover for the big companies too. Accepting and advocating whatever they do. Even when it is tricky, can find the way to defend the big names, because they are big names, they know the way, they became big!
Ah! The illusion of predictability (for the organisation, of course, because that's what only counts nowadays). Then users get tired/upset of the crap and walk away.
Like long lasting customers of my employer.
Still, the new investor pushes the method further, into infinity, price strategy 'modernization' and whatnot, so numbers and charts in categories of buzzwords look as they want in the sheets. For a while.
Functionality? Secondary, tertiary, or even lower priority annoyance.
I wonder why they invest in troublesome R&D and not in selling sugary water or something from that beatifully simple alley instead, that would be better playfield for them.
What is shocking is that deception is the common. Accepted, argued for by some. Loosing trust of the site/app doing the deception is the result. Becoming common, accepted, trend, and then loosing trust in the whole industry is the result.
Yeah, it's bad enough for capable users, but it's a nightmare for old people and the unaware. The online space is full of scams, and there's no real safe haven.
I feel that analysing details and consequences based on the article is premature and marginal. The reduction of 5-8% of medication using households is barely beyond measurable (we have higher variation by the season). Yet they use the words 'striking', 'steep'. Also saying 'clear changes' in one part then admitting 'the reduction becomes smaller over time' (without specifics this time). The highest decrease of 10% for savory snacks is also modest at most (e.g. still consuming 9 pack instead of 10 in a reference period. having nothing good to watch on TV might have higher effect).
The data might really be useful for the food industry once, but only after the usage of the medicine goes beyond 16% currently. 5-8% change, even 10%, for 16% of the population is tiny.
To me the study sounds desperate to project significance, using adjectives rather than data for seeking attention.
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