I'd give them the benefit of the doubt here. It's probably just because of the v...

amelius · on April 22, 2018

> It looks more like poor engineering than a dark pattern.

Poor engineering and sensitive data are a bad combination.

Dibes · on April 23, 2018

I am going to speculate that it isn't poor engineering per-say but more likely that they are solving for 95-99% use case and not spending the man-hours to make their systems work for the rest.

mattmanser · on April 22, 2018

I would buy that if they did that occasionally, but all their services behave badly when you try and take back some privacy.

To me it feels like they're deliberately making it painful when you minimise what you share with them.

Draiken · on April 22, 2018

I'd have to agree with the parent post.

They create things for the 99.9999% that don't care about privacy and will never touch those settings. When you leave that massive group, that's when bugs will be way more common.

We could argue that they intentionally only care about UX when you give them your data but then again that's capitalism, right?

They might have to give you choice to turn those things off, but nobody can force them to give you the same experience. Imagine any executive saying he will focus on giving a great experience for the users that they can't make money out of. He'll be out of a job very quickly.

mattmanser · on April 23, 2018

99.9999% means only 1 in a 1,000,000 care, where's it's more like to be 1 in 10 or maybe 1 in 20. If you'd said 90% or 80% you'd be closer.

It's stupid to make such a wild proclamation, that, for example, only 70 odd people in the whole of the UK care.

For Google it's millions or 10s of millions of their consumers.

Buge · on April 23, 2018

>They might have to give you choice to turn those things off, but nobody can force them to give you the same experience.

Isn't that basically what GDPR says? You have to be able to opt out of anything, without breaking things except when absolutely necessary.