Maybe some might feel that way at first, but it’s also an opportunity and responsibility to educate.
This problem is why enterprise contractual agreements and large compliance systems exist for companies at this scale. Large hosting providers like AWS, Azure, GCP, etc. provide an ability to scale and assurances about risk mitigation, privacy, and availability that are much more viable than each company having to maintain their own private in-house fleets just to create an additional illusion of privacy/security that’s actually no better than tight contractual controls to begin with.
Maybe they need to explain this properly, but servers don’t magically have a lower level of risk just because they’re behind your four walls. In fact, if you lack the experience and expertise, the risk is almost certainly higher depending on your threat model. (And for Apple, their threat model is at the nationstate level. They don’t choose their hosting providers lightly.)
Are… you really suggesting that the real problem here is not criminal extortion but that the payment approach isn’t safe enough to ensure their criminal associates get paid, and that this is what the feds should help improve?
It doesn’t need a cookie popup because they aren’t using cookies for non-essential reasons, similar to how it complies with GDPR because they aren’t collecting any data beyond what is necessary for the service’s stated purpose.
I don’t think any app store or payment provider would look fondly on a process that refunds that many transactions just because you want to turn around and double/triple the price. Credit card companies/payment gateways hate mass refunds and normally it could be cause to terminate your contract. To refund people because the app was forced to go out of business is one thing, but if you want to implement a price increase the supported way is what the developer said: to announce it in advance for next renewal.
Probably what you’d have to do is close the current app and publish a new app with the new business model (subscriber-only at a higher price). The amount of people who would move to such app would only be a tiny fraction of the previous userbase (as most app users were free before), and now you keep having to deal with this chaotic company who could just change the rules again at any time with little/no notice. Plus you’ll never get the kind of reach you had before without the freemium model. I think most indie devs would likely choose to just quit and move on with their lives. If someone wants to buy his code from him and publish their own subscriber-only app, probably it’s an option.
It’s basically a “dark pattern,” especially when the UI gives different presets and highlights one as “recommended” even though that amount isn’t actually normal to locals. If nothing else it’s taking advantage of visitors who don’t actually know the correct local customs, or trying to subversively change the norm by guilt-tripping the customer into thinking the workers depend on tips the way restaurant waitstaff do. I think that’s the root of the feedback reflected in the original survey.
In Canada, almost everyone pays by debit or credit card instead of cash. What has happened in the last few years is that the tipping function has been enabled on debit/credit terminals at many more businesses than it used to be, including many fast food chains. On the machine it pops up with recommended tip percentages like 15%, 18%, 20%, which are all calculated on the final total post-tax (which isn’t how it should be done but results in higher tips). So you could argue that this is just the digital equivalent of a tip jar (since many people don’t carry cash), but by presenting it in this way (with recommended percentages) it creates the implication that tipping is normal, and you don’t want to be the jerk who doesn’t leave a tip. So that’s why there’s this outrage (at least in Canada) about “tip creep.” It may be similar in the U.S. for people who pay by card vs. cash.
There’s no reason to lie - the way it’s stated makes it clear that it is not, in fact, an estimate of the total number of bots on the platform. They never stated the number of bots on the platform and never claimed to. The stat they gave (percent of monetizable users - those who see ads) may be not what Musk was asking for, but there’s no reason to believe they lied about a percentage they defined in a very specific way - especially when, even with that definition, it had a disclaimer that it was only an estimate and could be higher.
So the argument wouldn’t be that they lied. It would be that the information they provided wasn’t useful to gauge the true scope of the “bot problem” on Twitter - at best it’d be misleading by omission, which is almost certainly not illegal given what publicly-traded companies do all the time. (Making truthful statements and being fully transparent with all facts of a business are clearly not the same thing.)
Part of the reason Twitter is so hesitant to put some number on bots is because we’d first have to agree on how to define it exactly and how to measure it objectively. If someone uses the API or third-party app or integration to interact with Twitter, how do you prove they’re not a bot? Twitter’s definition avoids that by focusing on people who can see ads on the website and if you’re actually visiting the website proper (or using an official app) you’re much less likely to be a bot to begin with.
But honestly, all this stuff is just a distraction anyway. The SEC statements were there for years and if he doubted it this could have come up during due diligence. He only is making a stink about it now because a) he wants to get out of the deal at the quoted price and b) he wants to embarrass Twitter in the process. In fact, it seems to me this whole thing from the get-go was an exercise in the hopes of uncovering evidence of something salacious regarding “censorship” and various posturing around it. There never appeared to be any realistic and serious plans to address the issues at hand, just to gesticulate wildly about it in front of the press. I think those truly concerned about the problems being discussed should have hoped for better from this whole thing.
There are many gacha games on the market today that do post their odds and where player-validated data seems to support it. (Some jurisdictions like China and Japan require these kinds of disclosures.) But there are also a lot of markets that don’t require these kinds of disclosures and where there isn’t enough player data to draw a conclusion. So, in that case, how could you have confidence that they are not doing what you suggest? Even if they were, would it even be illegal? (If you never post what the odds are in the first place, is it fraud to keep changing the rules?)
This is why I’ve always been a bit surprised developers haven’t done more to get ahead of these kinds of issues with responsible disclosures and transparency, because it seems to be just inviting regulation. I honestly don’t think most F2P games pull the kinds of slimy tricks you’re accusing them of (most just use simple loot tables and RNG), but there’s nothing holding them accountable to say they can’t because everything is opaque.
This problem is why enterprise contractual agreements and large compliance systems exist for companies at this scale. Large hosting providers like AWS, Azure, GCP, etc. provide an ability to scale and assurances about risk mitigation, privacy, and availability that are much more viable than each company having to maintain their own private in-house fleets just to create an additional illusion of privacy/security that’s actually no better than tight contractual controls to begin with.
Maybe they need to explain this properly, but servers don’t magically have a lower level of risk just because they’re behind your four walls. In fact, if you lack the experience and expertise, the risk is almost certainly higher depending on your threat model. (And for Apple, their threat model is at the nationstate level. They don’t choose their hosting providers lightly.)