My mom complained that the New York Times was sending her recipe spam. It turned out there was no unsubscribe link; unsubscribing required *creating* a user profile for her, which then somehow showed her already signed up for it. How do people without tech family cope with this?
It takes me half an hour of Googling and three passes through settings to turn off things that are harassing my mom, who is extremely diligent about not auto-clicking "agree" on anything to begin with. Every update brings more of this crap to find and turn off.
I work in... well, let's say I tweet actively in the field of privacy, and if I devote a chunk of time to it and do a lot of research, I am able to set up my devices to work in a reasonably private mode. But this requires a lot of gardening and some self-discipline to maintain.
It's a crazy state of affairs. We don't have public health biologists teaching their families to do food assays during the holidays so they can avoid strychnine poisoning and botulism from canned foods. We have sane regulations and strict penalties for infringing them.
