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What concerns me is the attitude that users can be used and manipulated without their permission or knowledge; they have no choice or right to be informed, in t
by hackuser 11y ago
What concerns me is the attitude that users can be used and manipulated without their permission or knowledge; they have no choice or right to be informed, in this or in tracking or in many other situations. They are just objects of commerce to the developers, not human beings. This leads to bad practices like widespread confidentiality violations, free-to-play user manipulations [1], and the sorts of manipulation of customers practiced in places like Wall Street.
My feeling these days is that either you're on the inside or you're a sucker.
(On the level of fairness and justice - I don't know enough to comment on legality - I don't think this particular incident rises to the level of damages. However, Google could just display, In return for our free service, please help our computers read this word! Even Google's computers can't do everything - read more about it <here>. - Why not disclose it if you are doing nothing wrong? If you don't disclose it, you're manipulating people.)
[1] http://toucharcade.com/2015/09/16/we-own-you-confessions-of-a-free-to-play-producer/ http://toucharcade.com/2015/09/16/we-own-you-confessions-of-...
- dhimes 11y agoI have to agree here. What's wrong with disclosure? It seems to me that the judge ruled on the implementation and missed the concept- and may have set an unwitting precedent. Suppose Microsoft used a small bit of your unused processing power for some of their own work in order to increase their profits. It's likely few would ever know of this. Is that ok? Somehow I would feel...violated. Like somebody else just took rights to something I thought was under my control. Note: I don't use gmail, and I view ads on google. The reCaptcha I've seen has been on third-party sites. So their doing this seems to be outside of the 'contract' I have with them. I'm not doing this to pay for a service of theirs that I use- at least not directly.
- grkvlt 11y agoFrom the reCAPTCHA site itself: > reCAPTCHA offers more than just spam protection. Every time our CAPTCHAs are solved, that human effort helps digitize text, annotate images, and build machine learning datasets. This in turn helps preserve books, improve maps, and solve hard AI problems. That seems like disclosure to me?
- hackuser 11y agoThanks for pointin that out. Having filled in many CAPTCHAs, I was unaware of that disclosure. Assuming I'm representative, I don't think it's meaningful to disclose something where very few will see it - for example, burying it in a EULA doesn't help either.