Instagram says it's about to launch a bunch of new features that will make it safer for teenagers:
Among the measures, the popular photo-sharing service will be implementing tools to help users take breaks, or view new topics if they’ve been dwelling on one thing for too long....[It] will also block users from tagging or mentioning teens who don’t follow them. It will give parents more control over how long their children use the app. And in January, it will allow all users to bulk-delete their own content, including photos, videos, likes and comments.
That's good. Maybe just a good start, I suppose, but it's nice to see them responding to public criticism. At least, that's what I'd think if it weren't for this:
However, many features are “opt-in”—meaning they are off until users turn them on.
The boffins who run Instagram know perfectly well that if you make a feature opt-in, it's unlikely to get adopted by more than a handful of users. After all, this has been the playbook for years whenever Facebook pretends to address privacy concerns: add a bunch of complicated features, bury the UI someplace inconspicuous, and make everything opt-in without changing any of the default settings.
This stuff is only serious if you change the defaults. And while you can at least make a case against changing defaults on the fly for adult users, there's not much of case against doing it for teens.
...this has been the playbook for years whenever Facebook pretends to address privacy concerns: add a bunch of complicated features, bury the UI someplace inconspicuous, and make everything opt-in without changing any of the default settings.
And make the settings themselves unbelievably opaque and complicated to adjust.
This has been SOP for Facebook (Meta?) since their founding from what I can see. They're utterly unconcerned with privacy and with the mental health of their product (their product being their users, of course). I happen to be a semi-regular user of their Instagram product. But I don't kid myself they're looking out for me. And their flagship platform is one of the sorriest pieces of coding every conceived—simply execrable.
Horrible outfit.
"That's good. Maybe just a good start, I suppose, but it's nice to see them responding to public criticism"
So, public outcry over Word Press not having editing features isn't enough to get you to switch to Disqus?
Installing Disqus can be a fiasco. Comment editing by users can easily be added to a WordPress blog.
Listen, eventually Zucks is going to grow tired of his Tiger Bride, & he'll need a stock of low self-esteem yung women to choose from for his next wife. In that light, mismanagement of Instagram is exactly the management it needs.
"This stuff is only serious if you change the defaults. "
I'm not completely comfortable with this characterization.
OPAQUE defaults, yes, that is a problem. But that's not what is being complained about here.
If something is of so little concern to most people (either the users or their parents) that they couldn't even be bothered to spend a minute changing it, it's unclear to me why I should care either way.
It feels like this is one more attempt to square the circle of
- I claim to support democracy, liberty, people know best what they want, etc etc
- But people keep choosing "the wrong thing", and
- Rather than change my opinions as to the first point, OR accept that I can't control other people's lives, let me find some other random factor to blame for this.
This has been the leftist go-to move since at least "opiate of the masses" and it still remains the favorite.
I don't think the right is especially more virtuous on this front, but since they pretend less to speak for *all* the masses, they are also less often required to confront the fact that the beloved masses so often profess the "wrong" ideology.
As if your framing of the issue hasn’t been a right-wing go-to move for decades. Now, please explain why opt-in is liberty-crushing, but opt-out is not?
Me, I think when a company wants you to give them something for free that they will turn around and sell for their own gain, they could at the very least ask politely.