"I'm more concerned with the prevailing attitude in tech that it can do what it likes with our data and it doesn't feel it has to ask us. If anything the default is that you have to opt out of their processing of your data. Which is predatory behaviour as people need to know that they can opt out and the procedure for it needs to be simple, clear and concise. "
@onepict It's the classic mentality of "It's better to ask for forgiveness than for permission", which is wild, because no other form of human interaction is based upon it, other than relatively benign things.
For some reason it's more prevalent in tech than in other fields. We work with machines so much that it can sometimes be hard to remember that we're indeed humans and that we should be building software for humans as well.
@dusnm@onepict IIRC "It's better to ask for forgiveness than for permission" is from Rear Admiral Grace Hopper is about doing the right thing regardless of what you think your superiors might do. It really has been taken out of its context of power relations and used as a way of rejecting worrying about consent.
I think it is still the right thing to do when worrying about doing the right thing vs doing the thing your boss wants.
@otfrom@dusnm@onepict
Paul Farmer in Tracy Kidder's Mountains Beyond Mountains does something similar to "asking for forgiveness rather than permission"... But in his case.of getting top of the line medical equipment from Boston on Haiti, it easy a vase of asking Harvard ot a big hospital for permission after they had already taken the equipment to Haiti...
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