Yep, they might as well hire a lawyer to defend their bad decisions based on the exact wording of settings.
Nobody cares if the option doesn't literally imply it'll never "nudge" the user, I'd be annoyed regardless. And it's the only option visible to normal users.
There's no justification here for turning the feature on for users who have already explicitly chosen not to use it, or for not presenting them with the choice.
They don't have to. It can default to simple behavior, with the "techy-friendly" options hidden behind a "Settings - Advanced" menu or tab that regular users won't even visit.
999 lawyers out of 1000 wouldn't even be aware that no-select or no-right click are possible and I can't think of any potential legal risks that this would mitigate.
Edit: The text selection is also turned off on (most of) their terms & conditions.[1] I guess the park has one of those thousand lawyers because it certainly seems like the legal department is behind it.
I think the assertion is one of the tyranny of the default. If they are not blocked by default, then for the majority of users, the option effectively does not exist, since they will not proactively look for such a setting.
Doing this without actually bothering to let people know in an up-front, opt-in way certainly doesn't make the user experience better. While there's some conceivable value to the feature, turning it on without even letting users know is pretty bullshit and you're perturbing a lot of electrons in this thread with your defense of a really shitty default behavior.
The default setting should be to respect the privacy of the user first. Since they know most users will blindly go with the default, it's an asshole play.
Also, if they were behind a configuration option and defaulted to on, most people would be fine turning it off and forgetting about it.
This seems to be about lack of control. It's good for developers to think carefully before they ship products that do things with no way of being told not to.
EDIT: Welp. Apparently these settings exist.
I don't understand the point of the blog post then. Why is it so upsetting, if you have the ability to turn it off?
The amendment does not appear to restrict the selection of this option to those who go into settings, click on a privacy tab, and then choose an Advanced settings button, only to have to go through what choosing this means.
It's really easy to change the default though. You don't have to go deep into a menu to find the setting, it prompts you when you download the app. It's no worse than any other scary warning that users have become inured to on every other platform.
They've been actively hostile to friendly user settings for years. They constantly reduce what's exposed through the settings page, forcing users into about:config.
Nobody cares if the option doesn't literally imply it'll never "nudge" the user, I'd be annoyed regardless. And it's the only option visible to normal users.
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