We all know the answer to this. It absolutely should be opt-in, but they know that around 96% of people will never opt-in. See: iOS 14.5 privacy changes.
I agree with you but it seems that most people outside HN don’t agree. As long as it’s done for good
(organ donation) people support the same manipulation.
Presumption of consent in the context of organ donation is a very complex topic[1]. Amazon stealing your network is not a profound moral quandary, and comparing the two as level ground is either an indication of lack of comprehension or intentionally being a bad faith contributor to the argument. Either way it's not a helpful avenue of debate.
That's not necessarily true. The biggest reason that people don't opt in to things voluntarily is because people are lazy, not because they've weighed the options and decided that opting in doesn't benefit them. (See the sibling comment, which mentions organ donation.)
We had this whole debate over COVID tracking. They've come up with a system that is actually pretty secure. It's entirely client side: none of your location information is ever revealed unless you report yourself as having tested positive for COVID. Opting in is not that unreasonable even for paranoid people (I use the app). And yet it has to be an opt-in system, which means it's unlikely to be effective.
Similar with Apple having its network for those tracking things set to opt-out, not opt-in. Having the network available to its customers is a benefit to them, and not enough people would opt in.
IMO, we need a third alternative in between opt-out and opt-in. The first doesn't sufficiently respect individuals' right to privacy, the second falls apart in a kind of inverse tragedy of the commons. As far as I know the only possible alternative is forced-choice: while setting up the device you should have to read a short statement about what it can do and the positives / negatives, and choose whether you want to enable that feature.
I imagine many people working at Amazon do feel that this feature provides value to people without impacting privacy. It's effectively a very low bitrate VPN to the Amazon cloud for the purpose of controlling IOT devices. As far as mesh networks go, that's pretty unintrusive and certainly provides value to some customers, even though I agree that making it opt-out is unacceptable.
Like Apple Amazon will change to OPT-IN when it is in their own interest and likely only after killing off some competitors. So maybe in a few years time..
They just need to create some incentive to opt in. It could be get some discount or your devices get a fallback if you allow other users to get a fallback in the event of internet loss. That would be the right way to do this.