“Users want control” is a shoulder shrug

https://www.ianbicking.org/blog/2019/04/users-want-control-is-a-shrug.html

285 168 7 years ago

I first started thinking about this during the debate over what would become the ACA. The rhetoric was filled with this idea that people want choice in their medical care: people want control.
No! People want good health care. If they don’t trust systems to provide them good health care, if they don’t trust their providers to understand their priorities, then choice is the fallback: it’s how you work the system when the system isn’t working for you. And it sucks! Here you are, in the middle of some health issue, with treatments and symptoms and the rest of your life duties, and now you have to become a researcher on top of it? But the politicians and the pundits could not stop talking about control.

swagasaurus-rex• 7 years ago

I would want to choice not to place my physical and financial health in the hands of profiteering insurers, but that's currently the only reasonable choice we (people in the U.S.) have.

nostrademons3• 7 years ago

That's not true. There are a significant number of non-profit health insurance companies, insuring a majority of the total market:

https://www.firstquotehealth.com/health-insurance-news/non-p...

username223• 7 years ago

Let's put it in simple CRUD terms. Users want to:

C - control when you collect it.

R - read what you have on them, and know how you read it and/or share it with others.

U - update it, e.g. when it is wrong.

D - delete it.

Most users just want non-hostile defaults, but all users should have CRUD-control.

llamataboot2• 7 years ago

I'm not sure why this is downvoted - it's a little bit counter to the scope of the parent article, which applies to all sorts of design decisions, not just data retention and usage, but I would agree that this /is/ the base level of control over any data that a third party has from me and should be enshrined in law.

It has been great to see Apple, for example, move more towards better awareness and defaults for C, but by and large the internet is still a mess of hostile defaults, opaque privacy statements, and no way to know that this weather app is selling your location to advertisers when they could've just asked you for your location, if they wanted to be a weather app.

nostrademons3• 7 years ago

The truth of "users want control" depends on how closely your users' preferences resemble each other with regards to the particular service you're providing. If you can make one set of choices that works for all users, then no, users don't want control. If you can't, then the users will be demanding that control whether you give it to them or not, and if you don't they'll go elsewhere.

If you're small, you get to sidestep this distinction by defining your market carefully. Apple is one company that famously does not give users control. Is it true that PC users don't want control? No. That's why Windows has 80% market share in PCs and Android has 75% market share in mobile. But it's true of Apple customers, and in return for giving up control, they get a well-integrated user experience that's relatively bug-free, just works, and requires no extra thought on their part. You could look at dealing with hardware incompatibilities, avoiding crapware, integrating systems, and so on as services that Apple provides to its customers, and as a result they can charge a premium on their devices and make handsome profits.

This model falls down for public policy, like privacy, because people have different priorities that lead to different tradeoffs. I will happily give Google my location if it helps me avoid traffic jams, something many HN readers object to. I will post semi-identifiable comments on Hacker News, because I've derived fairly significant benefit from comments here. I don't generally post pictures of my family on Facebook. I certainly don't document my every waking moment with Instagram. Many other people make different tradeoffs, and that's their right.

It's debatable which bucket health care falls into - I suspect most people are in the "just make it work" camp until they dig into the details of exactly what experience and cost "just make it work" entails. I'll point out that the Apple experience for health care is completely possible with Kaiser Permanente and other managed HMOs, if you are willing to give up your choice of providers. Stay within their network and everything "just works", but then you have to stay within their network.

floatingatoll9• 7 years ago

Apple gives their users forms of control, but not necessarily the forms that HN commenters agree with.

For example, this week I was explaining to someone how different the iOS (possible) and Android (impossible) processes are for finding and removing spying crap if you don’t know how to operate technology very well.

I showed them Settings > General > Profiles on my phone, explained briefly that I’d opted in to them, and that they wouldn’t have that because they weren’t a developer.

They had it! For a coupon email spam account. That they’d tried out a year ago and were now unable to completely remove. They removed it immediately.

No, we can’t root iOS devices reliably (rarely at all), but in exchange, non-technical users gain control over their device to a degree that rootable devices make impossible.

It’s not about whether you have control, it’s about whether you have the degree of control you desire, and whether that control provides the needs you desire.

I, an advanced technical user, use iOS because I can prove efficiently that it’s unharmed. I consciously gave up a rooted device with a keyboard for it. I have a 50% typo rate and I miss a lot of things. But the need for safety is paramount, or else everyone protected by my MFA tokens is at risk from attacks so severe I can’t even fathom.

jeswin• 7 years ago

Different people want different things.

I can't use iOS because it doesn't meet my needs: T9 Dialer, Homescreen customization, Guest mode/Multiuser (not Guided Access), better notifications, real Firefox, better multi-tasking etc.

Add: I also think it's unfair to compare the security capabilities of a handful of Apple phones with the countless Android phones out there. People have the option of buying Android phones from Google, which have comparable security guarantees as any iOS device (while allowing root access to people who actually desire that).

theamk2• 7 years ago

No, we can’t root iOS devices reliably (rarely at all), but in exchange, non-technical users gain control over their device to a degree that rootable devices make impossible.

Can you elaborate on that? I read up on Apple's configuration profiles and they sound like Android's device administrators -- which can be easily removed from Settings -> Security -> Device Administrators [0]

[0] https://www.redmondpie.com/how-to-check-for-hidden-device-ad...

Despegar2• 7 years ago

While I agree with the rest of your post I want to respond to this particular part of it:

I will happily give Google my location if it helps me avoid traffic jams, something many HN readers object to.

The premise of this statement is that you have to give them this data to avoid traffic jams as part of an inherent bargain, but that's not the case. Yes at a very basic level maps apps need to access GPS to work, but the implementations matter. Apple Maps was specifically designed so that you can have those features in a privacy-preserving manner [1]:

“We specifically don’t collect data, even from point A to point B,” notes Cue. “We collect data — when we do it — in an anonymous fashion, in subsections of the whole, so we couldn’t even say that there is a person that went from point A to point B. We’re collecting the segments of it. As you can imagine, that’s always been a key part of doing this. Honestly, we don’t think it buys us anything [to collect more]. We’re not losing any features or capabilities by doing this.”
The segments that he is referring to are sliced out of any given person’s navigation session. Neither the beginning or the end of any trip is ever transmitted to Apple. Rotating identifiers, not personal information, are assigned to any data or requests sent to Apple and it augments the “ground truth” data provided by its own mapping vehicles with this “probe data” sent back from iPhones.
Because only random segments of any person’s drive is ever sent and that data is completely anonymized, there is never a way to tell if any trip was ever a single individual. The local system signs the IDs and only it knows to whom that ID refers. Apple is working very hard here to not know anything about its users. This kind of privacy can’t be added on at the end, it has to be woven in at the ground level.

Google is obviously trying to reframe the privacy debate into "yes we take your data, but it's necessary to give you valuable services" [2][3][4] (these last two takes seem to have just gone with the Google PR rep's package, given the titles) but that obfuscates that they're collecting way more data in a completely unfettered way outside of a specific purpose in connection with providing a service (something GDPR addresses but will probably need to be litigated). Apple repeatedly insists that providing great features/functionality doesn't have to come at the expense of your privacy. And I believe them for the simple fact that Google hasn't really been able to demonstrate what value they offer that only the Surveillance Capitalism model can provide.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/29/apple-is-rebuilding-maps-f...

[2] https://stratechery.com/2019/google-fights-back/

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/07/technology/google-privacy...

[4] https://char.gd/recharged/daily/google-finds-religion-in-pri...

cwyers• 7 years ago

I think for this to be dispositive, Apple Maps would have to be as good as Google Maps.

pbhjpbhj3• 7 years ago

So there's no way to keep a journey history on Apple devices using Apple maps?

umanwizard2• 7 years ago

The dominance of Windows and Android has nothing to do with whether users want control. It is because they are cheaper.

If you compared how many people buy a $1000 iPhone vs. a $1000 high-end Android phone, you would see completely different numbers.

My anecdotal observation is that when people aren’t price-conscious (either because someone else is paying for their device, or because they have a lot of disposable income themselves), they prefer Apple >95% of the time.

cannonedhamster2• 7 years ago

Your assumption doesn't account for the fact that the most common devices are Samsung Galaxy phones which aren't the cheapest on the market. While pricing certainly has an impact on some markets, in others it's more about prestige and surpringly iPhones have lost a lot of their prestige as they aren't far and away better phones than Android phones. They're still good phones and the Apple watch is hands down the best smartwatch on the market. My evidence is based on sales figures year after year. Currently devices like the Xiaomi Redmi and Samsung Galaxy lines are tops. When Apple tried a cheaper line it didn't sell as well as their higher end line. I'd argue that Android dominance isn't currently because of control either, it's because of ecosystem. It's easier to find an Android phone that meets your needs than an iPhone. That because there's only a few iPhones and hundreds of Android devices.

titzer• 7 years ago

I will happily give Google my location if it helps me avoid traffic jams, something many HN readers object to.

The fact remains, you have no clue what they do with that information, how long they keep it, and how many other people have done so. You can't review the code that collects the data, sends the data, processes the data, purges the data. You can't predict how the data will be combined with other data, and you can't control whether or not they share it with third parties, law enforcement, or intelligence agencies. You can clear your history and hope they abide by their word and comply with relevant laws, but fundamentally you don't know.

In essence, you have no clue what you are getting yourself into. Because traffic, or something.

Society-scale, this is a serious issue, especially when the default is "on". Opt out!

jcrben• 7 years ago

It's unrealistic that an organization can predict exactly what users want. If you try to do that, it's like central planning of the economy. It just doesn't maximize people's happiness.

However, if you give them lots of control and monitor choices, you can modify your defaults to improve that situation... but don't expect preferences to remain static.

shstalwart2• 7 years ago

...and monitor choices, you...

So... more telemetry. This user says no thanks.

torstenvl• 7 years ago

Control is what you need when you want something and it won’t happen on its own.

Err. Well. No, not usually. Usually it runs the other way. I want control because I specifically do not want you taking over my life, not because I disagree with the way you're taking it over. I don't want it to happen on its own.

I can imagine the author in an automaker board room, arguing vehemently that if they only move from a ten-speed automatic transmission to a twelve-gear, the smoothness and low-end power will make it so nobody wants a manual transmission anymore.

But that simply isn't the case. Freedom has inherent value. Simplicity and approachability have inherent value. People prefer to drive rather than fly or take a train because they want to be in the front seat - literally. Control has a value to it that far exceeds the mere pedestrian concern of whether your approach was good enough.

contextfree• 7 years ago

That's called out in the article:

"There are some cases when a person really does want control. If the person wants to determine their own path, if having choice is itself a personal goal, then you need control. That’s a goal about who you are not just what you get. It’s worth identifying moments when this is important ..."

thatfrenchguy• 7 years ago

I think this “a car give you freedom” American thing to be somewhat funny because to me it’s the opposite: a car is a huge investment, it costs you a ton of money per year, puts you down in one place (and thus prevents you from moving to another place easily), makes you mostly sit in traffic while going to work while contributing heavily to destroying the planet. I personally enjoy taking a train to where I’m going much more, especially in places where it’s convenient.

praneshp• 7 years ago

makes you mostly sit in traffic while going to work

Cherry picking this part of your argument: the last time I switched jobs this is what I told myself to rationalize commuting 50 mins one way (plus 15 mins last mile stuff). It works out _terribly_ if the mode of transport is not super reliable.

mixmastamyk3• 7 years ago

I was told, "you don't own a car, a car owns you," as a teen and it has stuck with me.

userbinator• 7 years ago

It's definitely very American, but the feeling of cruising down an empty highway in a piece of "Detroit iron" is something that has to be experienced to be understood --- if all you've ever driven or ridden in are smaller or less comfortable vehicles, I can see how you would think driving isn't very enjoyable. Even with lots of traffic around, I still think that sitting in my own "personal lounge" is better than sharing a cramped train or bus with all sorts of strangers.

maxsilver3• 7 years ago

I hear people make this argument all the time, but it makes no sense to me.

How does a car "put you down in one place" or "prevent you from moving easily"? A house prevents you from moving, a car literally moves you to many places. Cars are inherently mobile, that's kind of the whole point.

Similarly, a car is not a huge investment. A house is a huge investment. College is a huge investment. Any trip to a hospital in the US is a huge investment. Cars are cheap, all things considered. It's a climate-controlled, roll-cage-protected closet, with a built in luxury couch + radio + satnav system + emergency cellular connection, that can also propel itself quickly and reliably for hours at a time. And the total cost of ownership for most people is somewhere less than $300/month or so (even when including a loan payment for the upfront price). That's pretty darn cheap.

I could own 5 extra cars, for less than the cost of a single tiny 1bed apartment. I could own 3 extra cars, for less than the cost of daycare for one child. I could own 3.5 extra cars, for less than the cost of health insurance. Cars are pretty cheap, all things considered.

And unfortunately, there's literally nothing that can match that on comfort/speed/reliability/coverage right now. Just to get those same trips out of a train or airplane would easily cost 5x to 10x higher price. Busing can occasionally be cheaper (because a bus is literally just a shared car), but it only does that by making huge sacrifices on comfort/speed/reliability/coverage.

I personally enjoy taking a train to where I’m going much more

I mean, I totally get that. I love trains too. (I ride Seattle Light Rail, just for fun, and we take Amtrak to Chicago semi-regularly). Trains are fun. Trains are cool.

But trains aren't really good at transportation of people. Trains go almost nowhere, almost no one has access to trains in the first place, and the cost of trains is significantly higher than cars (both on what a single person has to pay to ride either, and on what the total infrastructure costs are for the entire system). It's pretty understandable how a car would give people a lot of real-world freedom, in a way that a train never could.

Talanes• 7 years ago

A car does not tie you down in one place in America, if anything it's the opposite. The places where you can easily live without a car are limited, especially if you aren't from the area and don't know which areas have good transit service between them. And if it's not a major area, it might not have any real options for getting into it besides car anyway. I looked into bussing to my hometown recently, and it takes 15 hours and over $200 in bus tickets to cover what would otherwise be a 6 hour drive.

llamataboot2• 7 years ago

Yes, but this is happening within a context. What subset of choices do you want to be able to make? Freedom to WHAT?

Something here about the difference between positive and negative rights but also in your specific example - what if I want freedom from all the negative externalities associated with car use (motorized vehicle deaths, non-pedestrian and bike friendly roads, sprawl, ground level pollution, etc), well now we have a conflict.

I agree with you that autonomy is a value in an of itself that may exist strongly or lightly in your user base, but it's still autonomy within a context.

(ie; i'd way rather have control over my location data going to third parties than have the freedom to change my keyboard, but that's a freedom that is hard to choose in my mobile phone)

GuB-42• 7 years ago

Control require investment on your part. For example when you drive, you don't do anything else (hopefully). There is only a limited amount of things you can control.

That's why VIPs like heads of state, high profile CEOs, etc... typically decide very little about their daily life. Some time it goes as far as not choosing what they wear and what they eat. That's because they have so much power that they can only control a very small part of it, and negotiating billion dollar contracts is more important than cooking breakfast.

Truth is, even if you think of yourself as a control freak, you probably have a whole lot of things you just want to work by itself. If you are a car enthusiast, you will probably want control over your car: manual transmission, self maintenance, use of aftermarket parts, custom paint job, etc... The car is one area where you want control for control sake, and that's fine and acknowledged in the article. But maybe fashion is not your thing, and when you want a suit for some formal event, you just go to a highly rated shop, ask the salesman and call it a day. Here, you don't want control, you don't want to spend hours finding the color that suit you best, match everything, etc... you just need a nice suit because you don't want to look like a clown during the event.

Reelin• 7 years ago

Making a decision to delegate something is very different from not having control over it.

Running with your example, I have complete control over the suit I wear; choosing to delegate that decision to the salesman is an explicit judgment call on my part. If I were to pick out my own suit and the salesman didn't agree with my taste, warning me that it looks bad is completely different from refusing to sell it to me.

microcolonel• 7 years ago

I want you to stop telling me what I want, because it is sickening in its own right.

strin• 7 years ago

Sometimes what users want is what users think of as a solution to their problem in the context they have. For example, users want better taxi services -> turns out ride-sharing is a better solution. Taxi service is a solution to the problem of getting point A to B.

sfink3• 7 years ago

Ride-sharing is a better taxi service. Or rather, the uber/lyft thing that is misnamed "ride-sharing" is a better taxi service. Better because of the experience of hailing a ride, and better because it is cheaper due to externalizing a bunch of costs onto the drivers and society. But not different.

m463• 7 years ago

I am reminded of a passage in the book "the subtle art of not giving a f*ck":

"For a relationshipt to be healthy, both people must be willing and able to both say no and hear no. Without that negation, without that occasional rejection, boundaries break down and one person's problems and values come to dominate the other's."

The problem is that users are not given the choice to say no.

johnrob• 7 years ago

I just saw ads on that blog post. I thought that was odd given the context. I went back to see again, and they were not there anymore. Is one of the included script tags up to no good?

ianbicking2• 7 years ago

:( Probably Disqus, I turned off ads but it looks like they've turned them back on for free accounts. I'd change comment providers, but doing it for new posts while leaving Disqus on old posts is beyond my energy level.

anbop• 7 years ago

OK, users don’t want control. I’ll start a Netflix with only one movie because they don’t want control over what they watch.

throwaway66666• 7 years ago

For instance, we say “users want control over their privacy,” but what people really want is some subset of:
To avoid embarrassment
To avoid persecution
… sometimes for doing illegal and wrong things
To keep from having the creeping sensation they left something sitting out that they didn’t want to
They want to make some political statement against surveillance
They want to keep things from the prying eyes of those close to them
They want to avoid being manipulated by bad-faith messaging

-----------

You forgot the two most important ones. Users want their privacy because.

A) they do not trust you.

B) They expect that everything they do, will be used against them. (eg providing an email address will result to receiving spam. Providing personal details to advertisers using them etc).

C) Info they leak, is leaked out forever. Today that might be ok, but circumstances might change tomorrow.

It is a bit dishonest to say that users want privacy because they want to do illegal things. Or that they want to make a statement against surveillance.

Wanting privacy is not a statement, it is an end-goal on its own.

Yes I am missing the point of the article but I had to point the above out.

mankyd• 7 years ago

A feel like your A & B are covered by the last and second points.

A) they do not trust you. Hence, they want to avoid manipulation in bad faith.

B) They expect private details to be used against them. Hence, they want to avoid persecution.

C, however, is an interesting point bearing further discussion. It's something that a developer can't address directly except to not have whatever private data is under consideration in the first place.

dkarl• 7 years ago

I agree, software developers are easily responsibility-shamed and the most insidious form of this is to tell them users want their employers to be in complete control of data and experience.

There's a kernel of truth, of course, which is that most users are happier to be unaware of when their privacy is at stake. Educating users about the consequences of using your product is always more of an effort than not educating them. That's the real responsibility that shouldn't be ducked, but for companies it's better to convince developers that "responsibility" means the cheaper route of keeping users in the dark.

closeparen• 7 years ago

The author addresses you pretty directly.

There are some cases when a person really does want control. If the person wants to determine their own path, if having choice is itself a personal goal, then you need control. That’s a goal about who you are not just what you get. It’s worth identifying moments when this is important. But if a person does not pay attention to something then that person probably does not identify with the topic and is not seeking control over it. “Privacy advocates” pay attention to privacy, and attain a sense of identity from the very act of being mindful of their own privacy. Everyone else does not.

flattone• 7 years ago

But privacy advocates do it on behalf of everyone else

Even if some majority of users do not care about privacy i dont believe our most fruit bearing path is build w/less autonomy.

There is so much distance between how things need to be built and whether or not end users identify with some component of the system.

tellak• 7 years ago

From a healthcare background I find your points to be incredibly rare in practice, and the articles more on point.. which makes sense given the context of the article.

For the most part patients trust their healthcare providers in privacy concerns, even in relatively speaking formerly strained contexts (predominant black patients with white providers).

I ask patients everyday about illegal or embarrassing or “wrong” activities with little resistance to candor.

Tech and social media has engendered a much more toxic attitude that the healthcare industry as a whole has avoided.

checkdigit15• 7 years ago

I wonder how much of that is due to the strong disincentives to misuse of health data by providers.

I suspect many people are more willing to be honest with health care providers about illegal or embarrassing or “wrong” activities because they know there is legal protection and harsh sanctions (e.g. loss of license, prosecution, requirements for professional education and exams in ethics as part of education/licensing, etc) if the provider breaches that trust. That sort of thing isn't typically present in the tech industry.

jakelazaroff3• 7 years ago

There's a difference between wanting privacy and wanting control over privacy though, right? I have a lot more respect for a company that doesn't collect information on me in the first place than one that lets me configure all the ways in which they collect my data.

pbhjpbhj3• 7 years ago

So you'd rather not have the choice to give up privacy, only the choice to forgo any benefits that can accrue by doing so?

That's like "I like masks, so only want to be invited to masked balls, not parties where I can choose to wear a mask"?

burtonator• 7 years ago

D) you don't want to be accused of a crime you didn't do just because circumstantial evidence implies that you did.. like when reddit or some other groups dox you online.

reshie• 7 years ago

you have to define control first. personally i think it is a dev to users in the form of options but you have to create options that will get the most need and has mostly the most following for the most part. with advanced users almost on par with developers some times a light hackable modular design is better.

hawaiian• 7 years ago

As a user of services, I do want control. Whether my privacy needs are met is not good enough unless mathematically guaranteed, and even then there are social/integration features that may add side channels that require control. An example of such a feature would be Signal requesting your contact list to find out whom, among your friends, is also using Signal (which isn't too horribly an anti-pattern in this case because the app still works without read access to your contacts).

Why? Because I want to be able to revoke access to any of several specific details about me or my device based solely on whether I feel like it. As soon as this is taken for granted, it is devalued and users lose leverage. Then the conversation during development becomes whether a proposed new feature is "worth" an encroachment on user privacy.

rb808• 7 years ago

related tweet from @SwiftOnSecurity yesterday.

"The difference between Excel and a database is if they use Excel they don't have to talk to your elitist ass."

Too true

barce• 7 years ago

I did a thought exercise and replaced users with pilots in light of the Boeing 737 Max crashes. Pilots wanting control is not just a shoulder shrug.

nhumrich2• 7 years ago

I mean, it is. If the plane could fly itself correctly, and know how to fix this problem without their intervention, then yes, they dont need or even care about control.

laughinghan• 7 years ago

How about a thought exercise where you replace users with the customers of the Boeing 737 Max flights---the passengers? They don't want control. They want to be flown somewhere without dying.

nhumrich2• 7 years ago

True. People didnt care about who had their data until the data started being used unethically. But now these unethical practices are so common, they are considered ethical. We used to print books with everyones name and number in the city. You would give your phone number out freely. But now, people keep their phone number hidden because its abused more then its actually used these days.

Causality1• 7 years ago

Frankly I'd settle for control of the hardware I paid good money for. Root access on my android devices. Full control over Windows Update without having to boot into Linux and rip DLLs straight out of the system folder.

phkahler• 7 years ago

Users dont want plugins or extensions. They want features that are missing from the product.

jancsika• 7 years ago

People don’t want to lose their data, but having personal control over your data is a great way to lose it, or even to lose control over it.

I don't think "personal control" implies that nobody else has full access to one's data. If that were true then NDAs would be useless.

The idea of users "wanting control" simply means they want ubiquitous software to work like the best parts of ubiquitous social structures they've grown up with that aren't the internet.

That is: facilitate personal growth and self-expression in a framework where individual failures and oversights don't accumulate to create a goddamned international environmental hazard.

For example-- I'd bet there are a lot of Youtube posters who would love the following two features:

1. Painlessly upload videos that assert their opinionated world view at that moment in time.

2. Have people find it without plugging into a recommendation rabbit hole of contention that reframes their content as yet another rusty nail in a goddamned international environmental hazard.

But if, as technologists, we can’t map functionality to desire, it’s a bit of a stretch to imagine everyone else will figure it out on the fly.

And one level above that-- if you don't have a legal framework where it's against the law to put cocaine in soft drinks then mapping functionality to desire will often be an unethical endeavor.

3xblah2• 7 years ago

How does he know what users want? I presume by the term "user" he means someone is not one of the authors or who cannot1 themselves modify the software as they wish.

As a user, I do not ever recall being asked what I wanted by anyone at Mozilla nor have I ever heard of any other user being asked.

1 I could modify Firefox but the compile process requires more time and resources than what I consider reasonable.

ianbicking2• 7 years ago

Mozilla uses telemetry in their products to try to understand what Firefox users want. We only use telemetry to improve our products (which is directly related to understanding user desires), and we have a data review policy to ensure we are collecting data in an attempt to improve things for those people we collect data from.

Additionally Mozilla regularly surveys samples of its user base, and conducts in-depth interviews of the public to try to understand desires.

3xblah2• 7 years ago

Are the dates, detailed methods and raw results of the "surveys" and "in-depth interviews" made available to the public?

rgoulter• 7 years ago

"try and understand underlying motivations whenever you see 'want control of X'" is neat point.

I'd think "if the system satisfies all the desires, people don't need autonomy" and "people need control/power, because systems inevitably fail" are two contrasting viewpoints.

mochomocha• 7 years ago

I'll offer a contrarian opinion. A lot of the issues raised recently in our industry around privacy or algorithmic bias come from the fact that as an industry tech has the hubris to believe that it knows better than its users what is best for them. Under the pretense of simplicity and scalability, we think that every individual behavior and tastes can be reduced into a one-size-fits-all product and business model, sprinkled with machine learning to give the illusion of a product experience tailored to different people, when in fact it is only mildly so. And I'm saying this as someone building machine learning models for a living.

solipsism• 7 years ago

You see it as hubris. I see it as earnestly trying to build amazing things but failing.

zoeysaurusrex• 7 years ago

I agree with you here. The majority of the people involved are trying to do something good. I’d wager the egomaniacs are a much smaller percentage than those who want to build better things.

benj1115• 7 years ago

Are they not functionally equivalent?

I suppose morally there's a difference, but that's just us and our biases.

calimac• 7 years ago

Hubris is a wonderful adjective for the arrogance now main stream in the industry.

citrablue• 7 years ago

Perhaps I am thinking too narrowly, but I think the algorithm-driven approach is much less hubris than someone at the company making a decision. These models reflect what users do -- isn't that much more democratic than employees deciding?

There is an orthogonal argument that this is also harmful to some people's aspect, but "give the people what they want" doesn't seem like it's reductive. Especially when it seems like people in our society can be clustered and have some clear groupings occur.

jakelazaroff3• 7 years ago

Is the algorithm-driven approach really any better, though? If our UI leads users to accidentally take an action, our data will actively mislead us into thinking it's what they want!

Designing clear interfaces, measuring things and coming up with models are all really hard. Data needs to be paired with human judgment and decision making.

naravara2• 7 years ago

These models reflect what users do -- isn't that much more democratic than employees deciding?

What users do is different from what users would like to do. If people's aspirations lined up with their real behaviors, Planet Fitness wouldn't have a business model. But when navigating the world people often want to improve themselves into something they want to be, not fall deeper into the worst tendencies they exhibit in any given moment.

farisjarrah• 7 years ago

You aren't wrong, but that's presumptive on humans being able to create algorithms that aren't implicitly bias. 2, hopefully not overly simplistic examples, A) Automatic Paper Towel dispensers that don't work nearly as well with people with dark skin. (Unintentional bias on the hands of the designers) B) People getting google banned and then being totally helpless and useless and not being able to get themselves unbanned (an algorithm determined there was abuse, and there is no recourse to tell the machine that it was mistaken, the entire thing was automated away via algorithms.)

r00fus• 7 years ago

So two competing priorities in a) giving users all the control/configurability they want and b) per OWASP and most SQL security standards “never trust user input”

Explain straddling that line ... oh and the third axis is cost.

Nasrudith2• 7 years ago

Those two are perfectly compatible actually - although doing both is harder and thus economically more expensive.

Not trusting user input is about security. Verify that everything is something which they /should/ be able to do. Think say for a game's bank account. They should never be able to directly change that value without valid transactions to and from.

If they can lose money by writing a check to null that is bad. If they can /gain/ money by writing a negative check to null that is /really/ bad. Also really bad is being allowed to just take money from banks of others without a validated transaction.

Configurability lets them do anything that is in their rights. If they can access their bank balance and set it as part of their signature that is allowed along with say setting their crosshair to display the target HP which they already know. If they can create a custom texture of their bank balance repeated ad nauseam that is fine. So long as they are capable of that stuff already.

sfink3• 7 years ago

I don't see that as a contrarian opinion, at least not with my reading of the post.

Bicking isn't saying you should decide exactly what your users want and give them that and only that. (Well, he's not saying to not do that either, if in a situation where that's doable...) He is simply saying that if your final conclusion is "users want more control", then you're copping out. You are giving up on figuring out what your users really want (whether they know what it is or not), and just throwing options at them in hopes that they'll be able to make something out of them. Or at least stop complaining.

Giving your users control isn't bad. Not figuring out why your users are asking for more control is bad.

doomglobe• 7 years ago

Most users don't want control - more things to think about takes energy and time. The users that do want control, however, are likely to be the users championing your product. Take a standard transmission in automobiles - the extra control it gives isn't necessary, and a large number of consumers prefer the automatic transmission. But the racecar drivers and car lovers are much more likely to want a standard. If you have intelligent, invested users, they'll want control options, and they'll usually tell you what they should be.

jdietrich2• 7 years ago

There's a big difference between "choice" and "control". iOS doesn't allow you to customise your home screen, but it does offer strong guarantees about what happens to your personal data. My local convenience store has a hundred different kinds of sugar-sweetened beverages, but no fresh fruit. My cellphone company offers dozens of different price plans, but they're so confusing that I strongly suspect that I'm being ripped off.

Choice only amounts to control if those choices are meaningful and legible.

WAHa_06x36• 7 years ago

This is absolutely not true. This is what they ACT like, but this is not their true motivation. These companies want all control to be theirs, and they want to be free to do what they want with users and their data, and they want to spend as little time, money and effort as possible while doing it. They know they can't state this honestly, so they dress it up in excuses, rationalisations and outright lies.

They KNOW they don't know better than its users. But they don't want to let users decide, because users would make decisions that go against their own profits, so they remove the choice and lie about why.

stcredzero• 7 years ago

A lot of the issues raised recently in our industry around privacy or algorithmic bias come from the fact that as an industry tech has the hubris to believe that it knows better than its users what is best for them.

A good way to summarize, "users want control," is to note that, "users don't want to be screwed." Users don't want to be put into a situation where they have lost so much power, they don't have practical options, or the only options they have left are punitively unpleasant.

setr• 7 years ago

A lot of the issues raised recently in our industry around privacy or algorithmic bias come from the fact that as an industry tech has the hubris to believe that it knows better than its users what is best for them.

I don't think this is that bad, on its own. Choice is a pain in the ass, so it's useful to have things pick for you, when you don't care to choose yourself (which is very common).

The main issue is that there is never offered a means to correct the algorithm, when it chooses something the user decidedly doesn't want. That is, there's no user-inputted feedback mechanism; they go for implicit tracking like "eyeball-time" to correct the algorithm, despite the user (me) being both able and willing to give an explicit answer. I want Netflix to give me better recommendations, and I'm willing to put in a bit of effort to support that.

But Netflix doesn't want me to help them help me.

And thats just stupid.

webmaven2• 7 years ago

Netflix used to have those explicit feedback mechanisms via user star ratings, and even ran a contest to improve their recommendations based on the data[0], but it turns out "that explicit star ratings were less relevant than other signals. Users would rate documentaries with 5 stars, and silly movies with just 3 stars, but still watch silly movies more often than those high-rated documentaries."[1]

Changing from stars to thumbs increased the quantity of data (at the expense of granularity), but didn't change the relative advantage of tracking behavior over explicit ratings.

Now, your ratings may be free of these issues, but that data isn't very useful in isolation, so blame the bad data from other users for the removal of the feedback mechanism.

[0] https://www.netflixprize.com/

[1] https://variety.com/2017/digital/news/netflix-thumbs-vs-star...

envolt• 7 years ago

People want good health care. If they don’t trust systems to provide them good health care, if they don’t trust their providers to understand their priorities, then choice is the fallback.

Applies to any settings page with too many options.

arendtio• 7 years ago

Having control is just the least common denominator.

Sure, in the end, people want other things and control is just a basic tool to reach a goal, but as long as we are not 100% sure what they want we will hold them back on their way to reach their goal if we take away their control.

- First, give users control (enable them to reach their goal, whatever that might be).

- Second, reason about what their goals are and make those easy to achieve (reduce friction, without taking the control away).

stakhanov3• 7 years ago

...kind of reminds me of a slogan by "Die Partei", a political party -slash- set of comedians that runs in German general elections as a platform for political comedy. The slogan goes "We'll do it right!" -- Laugh about it for a moment. Then think about why it is so funny. Then stop laughing when it dawns on you how f*ing terrifying it is that this is where society is headed.

scraegg• 7 years ago

In fact it is actually mutliple things, depending on the situation. I think the people Ian is talking about really exist. But I don't think it applies to health care. In health care it's actually a cost saving effort by politicians not unskilled providers trying to hide their lack of knowledge, i.e. reason (5) not reason (1). Therefore educating them or the public is also not an helpful action. More reasonable would be to try to figure out the cause of lack of funds and how to counter it, or if there is no way back to help people along the way, e.g. by writing an article about how to find and read research papers oneself as a previous user of a social health care system.

If you don't believe it or don't understand what I mean, read on:

1) In software dev "Product Owners" who have no idea of their job (or simply see that nothing happens and therefore have better things to do in their life than focus all their energy on their job) say that to have some kind of goal to work towards. True. That's probably also where Ian got this idea from. In this situation it's not unreasonable to do that because if he can't even act like he would have a goal he could not stay in that leadership position.

2) Users also really want control when they can't trust the actual service provider. And that doesn't just mean incompetent providers. It also means providers with goals that compete with the users. E.g. many countries now try to figure out how they can do nextgen_after_4g without Huawei, because they fear the political goals that might stand behind Huawei. In this situation it's also not unreasonable to want control.

3) A third reason is people who know the user's situation better than the user (e.g. IT security experts) and who want to help the users. In that case they will basically do the reason (2) fight for the users without much help from the users. It's a naive but admirable position to take. Not unreasonable.

4) Some people act like they would do reason (3) but actually just try to play games with the users on the user's cost. Anti-Vaxxers are such a group of people. Or the nationalist political grups we saw rise up a few years ago. They take an existing fear of uneducated users, escalate that to unreasonable sizes and then act like they would offer some help in exchange for money or votes.

5) Politicians and highest level corp leaders will say "users want control" when they have an area where they were providing a service in the past that the user come to expect, but for political or market reasons they can't provide that for much longer. So they act like someone else would want it. If they stand there in front of the camera in their $5000 suit, $200 hair cut, and their $3000 wrist watch nobody would believe them if they would simply say "all right guys, there is no more money for that service, let's pull our belts tighter". The only practical alternative I've seen is what the new Pope is doing. But that really needs a fanatic who can live an asketic life style which simply is not for most people. If most people can choose between a $5000 suit and a $2 self-knitted, itching rope then most people would choose option 1. So either you need to put one of a very small number of people in a leadership position and defend them there (which will cost you a lot as well), or you need to accept that "users want control" is the strategy the existing leadership is driving.

Imo the best approach is to think about how to deal with reality instead of hoping or fighting for a reality that can't exist. But I can even see the reasons for why one rather dies dreaming than live in reality. ;-)

stakhanov3• 7 years ago

It's not about knowing better, it's about actual conflict of interest.

Think about how much of the internet runs on advertising dollars. This leads to a situation where much of the internet serves the interests of people trying to maximize profits when selling stuff over the interests of people wanting to be well-informed about stuff they buy and looking for the best possible deal. -- When you search for "usb stick", of which there are gazillions, in an online store, which one will you be shown on page 1? The best product at the best price? Or the product made by the person who payed them to show their product first? (advertising expenses that they'll have to recoup by making that stuff more cheaply or selling it more expensively)

Think about how copyright owners instrument digital rights management to try to maximize monetization of content over allowing users to make good use of rights in copyrighted material that they already possess. -- If you're 70 years old, and you're into the beatles, you probably paid for that music at least four times. You bought a record when it came out, buying the right to listen to that music for the rest of your life. But for some reason, you paid for buying that right a second time when it came out on CD. A third time when you bought an MP3 download. A fourth time as part of a subscription package that you now have. -- The development of the technology did not serve the interests of the user. Otherwise, a RW-medium like minidisc would have won over CDs, allowing you to maybe record from vinyl to minidisc. "Copy Protected" CDs would have never happened but instead ripping-friendly CDs would have been produced because this was what would have been in the user's interest. And streaming would have happened on the basis of making micropayments when streaming stuff you don't already own instead of turning everything into a subcription package.

Think about how insurance companies might use the information gathered by the surveillance system which is the internet.

People THINK that when they are the ones paying for a computer, for an internet connection, etc that they are paying for technology that should now serve THEIR interests. The fight for user control is the fight to actually make that happen. And a fight it is. It's not a given that technology is made to serve the user's actual interest.

scarface747• 7 years ago

If you're 70 years old, and you're into the beatles, you probably paid for that music at least four times. You bought a record when it came out, buying the right to listen to that music for the rest of your life. But for some reason, you paid for buying that right a second time when it came out on CD. A third time when you bought an MP3 download.

Why would you buy an MP3 download if you already had the CD? The most popular MP3 player at the time - the iPod was used with iTunes that it made it very easy to rip your own CDs. There was a way to rip CDs in Windows 2 decades ago.

A fourth time as part of a subscription package that you now have.

If you didn’t want the benefits of having access to all the music out there and just wanted your own library, you still wouldn’t need a subscription service. In the case of iOS, you could pay a one time fee of $25 for Apple Match and you would have up to a year to use it. With Apple Match, it will match all of the music in your library no matter where you obtained it and count it as purchased song that you can redownload from iTunes DRM free.

The development of the technology did not serve the interests of the users.

The user has a choice between subscription music that has DRM, purchased music that is DRM free, or easy to use software that lets you convert physical CDs.

Otherwise, a RW-medium like minidisc would have won over CDs,

CD-RWs were already backwards compatible with CDs. I was burning CDs using a parallel port CDRW in the late 90s.

allowing you to maybe record from vinyl to minidisc.

You’ve been able to take a record player, connect it to the audio in Of a computer, record the audio and burn it to a CD. I’m sure there were standalone boxes that let you do it. ”Copy Protected" CDs would have never happened but instead ripping-friendly CDs would have been produced because this was what would have been in the user's interest.

Copy protected CDs were really never a big thing.

And streaming would have happened on the basis of making micropayments when streaming stuff you don't already own instead of turning everything into a subcription package.

People wanted subscriptions and not micropayments.

stakhanov3• 7 years ago

You're coming at it from the POV of a "power user". Most people aren't that.

Why would you buy an MP3 download if you already had the CD? The most popular MP3 player at the time - the iPod was used with iTunes that it made it very easy to rip your own CDs. There was a way to rip CDs in Windows 2 decades ago.

...actually, if you ripped a CD with iTunes, it would turn into a format that almost no software other than iTunes could read. The same thing was true about Windows media player. So you COULD rip stuff, but you would get from one kind of vendor lock-in into another kind of vendor lock-in. If you wanted MP3, you had to put a fair amount of thought into it, download special software, etc, i.e. you had to be a power user, and you had to put a lot of work into it if you had a couple hundred CDs on the shelf and wanted your collection to go on a hard disc. Besides myself I know only one other person who did that.

Also: I was making a more general point here. Substitute "DVD" for "CD" and "movie" for "music" and the argument still holds. DVDs had encryption that had to be cracked by somebody, the crack having to be obtained illegally by anybody who wants to rip a DVD.

The actual point I was making was the following: These examples show how, in one area, the tech industry will be hard at work trying to make certain things DIFFICULT (like cancelling a subscription deal, where they might accept fax as the only method of communication, or copying copyrighted material) and hard at work trying to make other things EASY (like signing up to a subscription deal, re-purchasing stuff you already own). Most people go the way of what's EASY. But that does not usually serve their own interests.

The user has a choice between subscription music that has DRM, purchased music that is DRM free, or easy to use software that lets you convert physical CDs.

Purchasing music that is DRM-free happened very late in the game and is still a niche topic. The first businesses to try and offer downloads that you'd pay for (like napster when it tried to go legit) failed because they couldn't get content deals, because the music industry didn't want DRM-free downloads for fear they would be copied illegally. The first service that actually made it commercially viable was iTunes, and they only managed it because they could get the content industry on board through introducing DRM. -- The fact that we now have DRM-free downloads in certain niche areas is a side-effect of the fact that most people have subscription packages now anyway, and offering DRM-free high-quality music is now a way to charge them YET ANOTHER time. (purchasing that Beatles album for the fifth time).

CD-RWs were already backwards compatible with CDs. I was burning CDs using a parallel port CDRW in the late 90s. You’ve been able to take a record player, connect it to the audio in Of a computer, record the audio and burn it to a CD. I’m sure there were standalone boxes that let you do it.

That made YOU a 1-percenter when it comes to technology. Most people I knew in the late 90s could have never figured out how to hook up a record player to a computer, record a WAV file, and burn it back to a CD. -- You're not representative for how that industry works/worked at any point in history.

arno_app• 7 years ago

How can you trust a system you don't control or see how it uses your data? With this premise the main claim becomes invalid imo while I agree with your point what users desire but I still think control and sovereignty are major points

gnode• 7 years ago

For me, control in technology does not mean being able to go and press buttons in a maze of options. Control means being able to use an ad-blocking plugin in a browser written by an ad-tech company, to use off-brand ink in a printer, or to use a government API with a program written to optimize my taxes.

oytis• 7 years ago

As a control freak I don't agree. I feel uncomfortable even with good solutions I don't understand and have no control over. I think a lot of Linux users like myself have chosen it because of that in the first place.

And the same holds for privacy even more. I'll prefer encryption on my machine with my keys to the best permission model in the cloud.

psychoslave• 7 years ago

Most users want to take back control when the default behavior stands in the way of their current workflow. So the best scenario is the default configuration is handy for basic uses, and the behavior can be tweaked extensively when needed.

ajuc• 7 years ago

For instance, we say “users want control over their privacy,” but what people really want is some subset of:
(...)
To avoid persecution
(...)

That's like saying "drivers don't want safe cars, they just don't want to die in a car accident".

Will you stop making safe cars, then? If not - how is that an useful information?

I understand it wasn't the main point of the article, and I might even agree with the main point in general (I'm not sure, there are exceptions), but that was bad example.

fareesh• 7 years ago

True, but also possible that users want control.

dboreham• 7 years ago

Lost 5 minutes to wondering what other thing you can shrug...

norswap• 7 years ago

As a counterpoint, if you give users control, you don't have to figure exactly what they want. They can also get creative.

And in some cases that is exactly the right approach.

Eric_WVGG• 7 years ago

The economist Theodore Levitt said “consumers don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill, they want a quarter-inch hole.”

LaGrange• 7 years ago

Making the claim “users want control” is the same as saying you don’t know what users want, you don’t know what is good, and you don’t know what their goals are.

Yup, that's exactly what I'm saying. There might be overriding concerns coming from _community_ needs (which is where arguments for things like ACA and other public healthcare come from, actually, and why I might not give a user a particular configuration option), but while I might know better what a platonic ideal of a user wants, what any particular user wants _I do not_ unless I ask them.

vorpalhex2• 7 years ago

Nobody ever has your best interest in mind except yourself.

You can throw all the money in the world at healthcare, you can make it free, and you should still get a second opinion and be involved as a direct agent in your health choices.

Humans are agents, that is to say, they have agency. There is no single optimum outcome for all people - there may be an optimum for a business (the most profit), a healthcare provider (the least amount of getting sued) or other entities, but there is no single best outcome for agents.

Given that no system can give the best outcome for all people, the system shouldn't even bother but instead empower people to make their own outcomes. The problem is that sometimes people choose bad outcomes - but that is also an expression of agency.

sfink3• 7 years ago

Sure. But only giving users control, in the form of being able to choose between the available providers, does not solve the problem by itself.

Say you sprain your pinky finger and your insurance covers two doctors: Donald Drugmeister who can afford to pay his office staff only by pushing the latest offerings from Pfizer, and the excellent surgeon Carl Cutter who will decide your root problem is in some organ that needs to be removed. You may feel vast relief that you're able to choose Donald over Carl, but in actuality you'd be better off going to your mom who will give you an ice pack (not covered by your insurance!) and kiss you on the forehead.

The US healthcare system, at least, cannot be fixed simply by handing over all control to the patients. That'll just end up with even more strenuous efforts by the pharmaceutical companies to convince of us, the non-medically astute population, of the necessity for various drugs that they happen to make money off of. And even more antibiotic overuse and unnecessary procedures.

I think having choice of doctors is part of the solution, as is having a pretty high degree of control over what procedures and drugs are used in each personal situation. But if the only fix on offer is to allow more control over the choice between mediocre or bad options, then we're all screwed. (And the less privileged are even more screwed than the rest of us.)

I agree that the system shouldn't even bother to guarantee the best outcome for all people, but I don't think empowering people to make their own outcomes is going to get us very far.

vorpalhex2• 7 years ago

Whether it's the US or the UK or wherever, you need to be an active participant in your health choices and reading up on the materials available to you.

That isn't affected by whether your healthcare is socialized or infinitely expensive.

You probably have more choice in a non-totally socialized healthcare setting, but only to the extent you can afford choices. Neither extreme is any good, but the ideal is a golden median with many affordable choices.

Data_Junkie• 7 years ago

Reminds me of when Gordon Ramsey tried to explain to a clueless "chef" not to just give endless options. " Well why are you here then ? "

“Users want control” is a shoulder shrug

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