alt Hacker NewsFWIW I don’t find what you wrote confusing, but I do think it is following a sort of… bad convention that some companies have been pushing.
Opt-in and opt-out describe the nature of the choice that you make. “Opt” means to choose (apparently it is a French word we stole). Opt-in means you have to proactively choose to be in. Opt-out means you have to proactively choose to be out. “Opt-in by default” is an overly verbose way of saying “opt-out.”
In either case it describes the choice that you need to proactively make to override the default behavior.
Edit: I should also say that it is a “known point of contention” where pro-privacy people have been pushing back on this phrasing. So, you have probably accidentally stumbled into an ongoing discussion, which is why some of the comments might be unexpectedly prickly.
>Edit: I should also say that it is a “known point of contention” where pro-privacy people have been pushing back on this phrasing. So, you have probably accidentally stumbled into an ongoing discussion, which is why some of the comments might be unexpectedly prickly.
Yes, because people will say that something should be opt-in, meaning off by default, and then someone makes it on by default and says 'oh, it's opt-in, you're just opted in by default!'