4 ms·

Marc Stiegler suggested having a set of standard authority bundles for when you're installing more or less standard app types. (Of course this raises the questi

Marc Stiegler suggested having a set of standard authority bundles for when you're installing more or less standard app types. (Of course this raises the question of getting to a standard designed with users' interests in mind.) Then an app wanting undue authority would have to incur the pain of getting users to install it in a special unusual way. (He made that suggestion back before Android etc. existed.) People are pretty OK at judging and tracking what to entrust other people with. This suggests the problem shouldn't be impossible, but that our interfaces don't map well to those familiar abilities.

jgtrosh 9y ago
> Then an app wanting undue authority would have to incur the pain of getting users to install it in a special unusual way. Isn't that similar to getting people used to installing anything they find on the web on Windows and just pressing accept for everything? I'd say a viable system needs to explicitly address special authority and make users are of it as an important thing, but still within the normal course of UX, to keep the distinction meaningful. The current state of Android is in the other direction: it explicitly addresses authority for many accesses, but they're not fine grain enough; so apps ask for a lot, getting people used to accept early without having a clear idea of what the app will do in the future, making it cheap for the programmer to ask for many accesses.
- thingification 9y ago
  Right. The authority is not fine-grained enough because grants of authority are not dynamic (meaning they happen up front when the app is installed, not while the user is using the app). If the grants were dynamic, the context is clear to the user, who can therefore 1. understand what the grant is for 2. make an informed decision 3. use UI patterns like "powerbox" in which there is no "security UI", just UI that would be needed anyway. When that is true, finer-grained can be easier for the user, not harder. Of course there is more to it, e.g. kentonv's important point re substitutability. Some otherwise capable programmers don't seem to understand that point even in the domain of programming (as opposed to UI).

jgtrosh 9y ago

> Then an app wanting undue authority would have to incur the pain of getting users to install it in a special unusual way. Isn't that similar to getting people used to installing anything they find on the web on Windows and just pressing accept for everything? I'd say a viable system needs to explicitly address special authority and make users are of it as an important thing, but still within the normal course of UX, to keep the distinction meaningful. The current state of Android is in the other direction: it explicitly addresses authority for many accesses, but they're not fine grain enough; so apps ask for a lot, getting people used to accept early without having a clear idea of what the app will do in the future, making it cheap for the programmer to ask for many accesses.

thingification 9y ago
Right. The authority is not fine-grained enough because grants of authority are not dynamic (meaning they happen up front when the app is installed, not while the user is using the app). If the grants were dynamic, the context is clear to the user, who can therefore 1. understand what the grant is for 2. make an informed decision 3. use UI patterns like "powerbox" in which there is no "security UI", just UI that would be needed anyway. When that is true, finer-grained can be easier for the user, not harder. Of course there is more to it, e.g. kentonv's important point re substitutability. Some otherwise capable programmers don't seem to understand that point even in the domain of programming (as opposed to UI).