Exactly. Amusing indeed.

Why is this quackery front page?

Fonzie absolutely cared about being cool, too. It's why he jumped the shark after all. (Pun fully intended.)

    By the time Gettler looked into this field, it was already an established fact that fathers had lower testosterone that [sic] men without kids.

I'm sure this typo will be promptly corrected. But it does offer some sense into how thoroughly this article was proofread prior to publication.

Positive sign that this article wasn't AI

Lol, I thought the same.

I knew a sub-editor. According to them, they were not to use a spellchecker because it would lead to them being sloppy when checking for mistakes.

I think about that every time I see a typo, and about that study showing that journalists aren’t the brightest[1].

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/journalists-brains-function-...

> if your developing geolocation based apps, location tracking is a core function.

But the subsequent sale of that data is not—is the discussion here.

and the reason why that data is available for sale, starts with forced collection of data, if you want to participate in an app store as a developer.

you cant sell what you dont have unless you lie lower than a rug.

fix the data collection problem and a second order effect of no data for sale emerges.

Are you suggesting Android/iOS app developers are forced into data collection somehow? If so, how? I'm genuinely curious.

'Inside' perspectives can be equally useful or ignorant. The questions remains: why the distinction between inside/outside?

I think on average, outside perspectives are less well-informed than inside ones. It's a decent first-pass filter for quality, despite its inaccuracy.

I see this frequently as an engineer: my pet peeve is the "can't we just..." from someone who has no idea how the system works. Occasionally they're correct that we could make a trivial change to make something work... But most times, that "just" is hand-waving away days/weeks of effort. On the other hand, when "can't we just ..." is uttered by someone else on the same team, they're usually correct that the change is indeed trivial.

In this case, "outside" vs "inside" is actually a good proxy for how informed or accurate the opinion actually is.

Another good example is the stereotypical "expert in a field who thinks their expertise trivially transfers to unrelated fields".

To put it more simply: the distinction exists because outsiders are very frequently blind to the internal complexity of something (a system, an idea, etc), but are still willing to confidently assert their ideas anyway, leading to a frequent association of "outsider" with "poorly-formed opinions".

GP states correctly that they believe the default 'choice' of a user should be 'opting-out' of location tracking.

This is utterly confusing the use of the terms. Opting is making a choice. The default isn't a choice. Opting by default makes no sense.

Yeah it is. What I mean is the default is you have not opted in. You must choose to opt in for this type of tracking. It should be a choice that doesn’t preclude you from using a service if you don’t allow tracking.

You are describing opt-in policies — you’re out by default and you have to opt-in to be tracked.

> and location is critical for myriad purposes.

It's not though.

Critical for myriad elective purposes? Sure.

Only if you consider the entire concept of logistics in civilization as "elective".

Seems hyperbolic we had logistics that functioned extremely well before we had customer location data for sale on 3rd party sites.

If you re-read the comment they didn't say that selling it was intrinsic.

The article is about privacy tracking spyware cookies. I think making statements in that context about how modern logistics don't work with out location data implies you mean location data from those sources. I mean i suppose it doesn't have to but than it just feels off topic no?

I don't follow what you mean by 'logistics in civilization' as that's pretty vague and amorphous.

Could you be more specific with maybe a single example of where my physical geographic location is electronically critical for a purpose that isn't elective/optional/avoidable?

(And I'm not just trying to be obtuse. I think you're touching on at least part of the 'heart' of both this conversation and that of digital ID verification.)

'Technically incorrect' on a matter of U.S. constitutionality, says the poster talking about capital-'s' soil. Right.