> Lay people cannot dictate how technology must work.
That's an extraordinarily elitist view that, frankly, raises my hackles. It's worth remembering that the entire framing of entire political systems was and is done by non-technical "lay" people.
> It's simply not appropriate to assume that just because a lay person wants something to be true, that it must somehow be possible to actually do.
That's got everything backward. Regulation is about limiting technology's intrusion into our lives, technology that did not exist just short years and decades ago. Since we lived without this technology (by definition) since the dawn of man, clearly it is technically feasible.
The attitude above is basically arguing for a technocracy where the "lay" people just have to suck it up and accept whatever their overlords thrust on them. Hint: it's gonna be heavily weighted to those overlords making money and taking choice away.
I don't think it's elitist, it's really just HCD, no? We know that users are great at helping engineers hone in on their problems, but not so much their solutions - the whole "faster horse" thing.
There's more than one problem here, but one main one seems to be that users don't understand that incognito is more about your own computer (cookies, history) than the web's ability to do its thing.
Solutions could be anything, from do not track toggles and added incognito funtionality, to a simple visual indicating the point of incognito, to some trivial copy/branding changes.
Here's how I want encryption to work: it should be unbreakable when it's used to encrypt communication between journalists and their sources, but it should be breakable when used to encrypt communications between terrorists. I really "want [this thing] to be true". So why doesn't it work like this?
Would you ask someone random off the street to invent a COVID vaccine? To treat someone with cancer? To represent you in a homicide trial? Maybe you could get them to opine about what interest rates to set at the Fed?
We hire scientists, doctors and lawyers to do those things. No one thinks it's "elitist" to say that lay people's opinions on how to do those jobs is worse than irrelevant.
We need to accept that "computer technology" is one of those things that is simply too difficult for most people to simply intuitively know about without actually putting in the effort to understand it.
That's an extraordinarily elitist view that, frankly, raises my hackles. It's worth remembering that the entire framing of entire political systems was and is done by non-technical "lay" people.
> It's simply not appropriate to assume that just because a lay person wants something to be true, that it must somehow be possible to actually do.
That's got everything backward. Regulation is about limiting technology's intrusion into our lives, technology that did not exist just short years and decades ago. Since we lived without this technology (by definition) since the dawn of man, clearly it is technically feasible.
The attitude above is basically arguing for a technocracy where the "lay" people just have to suck it up and accept whatever their overlords thrust on them. Hint: it's gonna be heavily weighted to those overlords making money and taking choice away.