Where did "No" go?

[Mario]

As a developer, I have created many "Do you want to do XYZ?" messages boxes with the choices Yes or No.
And, when applicable, with the addition of a "Don't ask again" check box.

After recently installing and configuring a new phone and a new laptop, I have seen quite a number of message boxes with the choices Yes and Not Now.

Usually in relation to things like privacy settings, marketing contact permissions, tracking permissions, telemetry and other things where the software company really, really, wants you to agree to their question. Because it makes them money.

They don't give you the choice to say "No, I really don't want you to track everything that I do on my phone/PC". You can only say Yes, or they bring up the same message box over and over, with the only options being "Yes" and "Not Now".

I find this strange and quite annoying.

IMatch asks you once if you allow telemetry. If you say no, it stores the answer and never asks you again. It presents my case once, but that's it.
I think users would give me a hard time if I would change this dialog to show only "Yes" and "Not now" choices.

[Jingo]

Agree.. I think they are hoping at some point down the road, users either mistakenly just hit "YES/OK" or get tired of seeing these messages and just hit "YES/OK" to stop them.  Not a fan of this practice either!

[Mario]

It's a dark pattern for sure.

[Damit]

Very annoying!  How about the iphone's insistence in turning on live photos repeatedly or taking me to the password input screen to start downloading an update when I specifically told it I did not want to update it. Another thing it did was turn on automatic updates without me changing my setting.

Sometime around 2008-10 programmers decided they knew how to operate their software better than users and began to dictate how we could use their software: Here is a ribbon, you MUST use it! Apple, of course, has been doing it since the eighties, which is why I never bought into their ecosystem.

[RobiWan]

IMatch asks you once if you allow telemetry. If you say no, it stores the answer and never asks you again.

Never? I can't confirm that.
It's not often, but I mean after an update or if I don't use IMatch for a while

I find this strange and quite annoying.

Yes, that is often the problem. Manufacturers are becoming more and more aggressive when it comes to acquiring customer data

[Mario]

Well, it might ask after an update, when something has changed. Not sure. It's years that I've looked last at this code.
Might be an ask again every so often. But there is a "No" and not just a "later" or an always "on" minimal telemetry like in so many software products today. Most won't even tell you...

Telemetry is important because it shows me how you use IMatch, what works, what does not work, what is used how often etc

The only person ever seeing this data is me. I don't sell or share your data. It is deleted after 3 months, to save disk space on the server.

Every user not participating in telemetry causes gaps and uncertainty in the data. And when I remove a feature you use every day because I don't know because you don't allow telemetry, that would be bad, right?

[MrPete]

I think users would give me a hard time if I would change this dialog to show only "Yes" and "Not now" choices.

Even worse: too often an app (particularly social media) will add new permission settings. Invariably, they assume my answer is "yes, allow this" and I start receiving unwanted messages etc.

Grrr.

I used to be an insider in the marketing data business (we're talking decades ago, pre-Internet LOL.) I always said: Big Brother is here right now. It is not the gov't, it's Big Business Marketing.

Now, it's both of course.

[Mario]

Related:

today I've visited the popular web site "The Verge" with the Firefox browser in private mode.
Since I live in Germany, the site is required to show me a "Cookie Banner", asking me to allow them and their "partners" to track me  - or not (at least not via cookies).

What I've found particularly interesting is the first sentence in their cookie banner:

"We and our 845 partners store and/or access information on a device to..."

This means when you allow the site to set cookies, they and their 845 partners (further disclosed in a super-long list) can track every movement you make on the web (via third party cookies), on every web site also partnering with at least one of these 845 partners.

And then these companies wonder why users, for their own protection, enable ad-blockers and delete cookies automatically and whatnot (for the small percentage of the population being aware of what a cookie actually is and using a privacy-oriented browser). Or why the EU has such strict rules about privacy.

I'm aware that the internet mostly is paid for by ads and gathering, accumulating, analyzing and selling data about us.
But it becomes more and more an act of self-protection to avoid cookies and other invasive tracking technologies by using a privacy-oriented browser and add-ons like ublock Origin.

And if you visit www.photools.com or this community, you will notice that neither ublock Origin nor DuckDuck Go Privacy Essentials find anything to block or report. Because I want my sites to be clean and privacy friendly.

[MrPete]

(Been offline since March. Lots of life-stuff )

Sadly, even same-site cookies or other usage tracking info (eg Google metrics triggered by use of any of millions of websites)... gets stored offline in supposedly innocuous ways. But then we discover:
- those data sets get handed off quietly to other players, and/or other teams in the same Big Tech Company
- and a month or two later, you get fed a short video when you visit YouTube (or whatever) designed to subtly impact your perspective on a person or topic.

Subconscious Psychological Microtargeting. How wonderful. NOT. (I assure you this is 100% real. I've certainly seen it in the consumer marketing world; I've seen plenty in politics and much more. A friend in the 'spook' biz puts it this way: if we can locate a person, and know a reasonable amount about them, we can pretty much make them do anything we want w/ these methods. Ethical? No. Effective? Yes. )

[Mario]

On the other hand, Amazon still shows me ads for washing machines, 3 months after I've bought a new one. Not that smart they are

[MrPete]

On the other hand, Amazon still shows me ads for washing machines, 3 months after I've bought a new one. Not that smart they are

YEP. In fact the vast majority of ads across the board only begin to show up after we purchase.