If there was an option in the settings menu to disable this, would you be worried about your mother and father finding it and changing it from the (safe) default?
Oh man that's annoying! The funny part is that it annoys especially those who are careful about their data. So it is basically an incentive for being loose with privacy. Long ago I used set this setting in my parent's browser but they simply could not stand it.
The feature is "opt-out" in the sense that they based the default on some other privacy setting. It was disabled by default, for me. But I've been fairly diligent over the years, going through and disabling the things that I didn't want.
That's good and I had it turned off already but one ongoing issue is that I have to crawl through all the various settings every couple of months since there's always new privacy invading stuff found and it's obviously turned on by default.
It should be off by default, rather than on by default, so you can choose to have it, and we don't accidentally go to prison for going to a doctor who was legal to visit last week and forgetting to alter one of a million privacy settings on one of fifty devices.
Huh? That's the easiest one of all - anything that is privacy invading should be off by default. Most of us are not super aware of what the hell is 'on and off' in this nutty world.
It's exceedingly nuts to me that I would start doing something and all of a sudden random strangers could hear me or interact with me.
Default off for everyone, probably by law.
Anyone can just turn the default to be 'on' it's not a big deal.
Yeah I agree, these settings should be disabled by default and require explicit opt-in. That said, I am impressed by how privacy/security-conscious the OS seems to be otherwise!
It's been awhile, but IIRC the recommendation to disable it is based on security, not privacy. Other comments here explain it better than I could, not a programmer by trade.
As far as I can tell, it is an optional feature. It's the default option, but still an option. On top of that, a fair argument could be made that most people who don't care enough to change their privacy settings probably do prioritize convenience over maximal privacy, so this might even be a reasonable default.
I like that it's the default though. Privacy first!
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