Your PMs should not decide what your software does with my hardware without me giving my informed consent.

Our PMs don't like making things opt-in.

-> Your users don't like making things opt-out. Low usage metrics is a UX problem. Activating it without informed consent gives you bloated metrics anyway.

Make a pop-up with the opt-in/out for all the features on first launch with everything defaulted to on so people can turn features off and get notified that such features exist. You can also use this to gather metrics on what features people are actually interested in.

Good compromise.

Your new feature is privacy invading. It's none of your business to detect if someones mic is on unless they invite you to do that.

What is so hard about that?

> Our PMs don't like making things opt-in.

Lamest excuse ever.

I wouldn't be surprised if you phoned back home about that mic activation - do you?

I recently joined an org where Notion is in use - I will actively lobby them to not install the desktop app, at all or to quit Notion alltogether.

Get better PMs. Seriously. Users shouldn’t have to opt-out of something for privacy. Respecting privacy should be the default. If a user finds value in letting you listen to the microphone, then great! But you have to inform them! There are also other ways to get the same information — such as if the user also shares their calendar. This is sneaky and evasive behavior.

But none of this conversation makes me want to use Notion. We used to use it at $OLDJOB for meeting notes and light DB work for non-technical users. Now I’m happy we stopped.

> A feature that's opt-in will get like 1% of the use of a feature that's opt-out.

Well... yeah. It's either because the benefits of opting in aren't communicated well enough or that users just don't actually want it.

For AI meeting notes, I'd imagine it's the latter.

> Our PMs don't like making things opt-in.

Thank god the web browser was developed in an era where PMs weren't stack-ranked on rubrics like "feature engagement". Imagine a world where every website was granted access to your filesystem, webcam, microphone, and geolocation by default so that PMs could report back on how many websites were making use of those browser APIs.

> Our PMs don't like making things opt-in.

Tell them that alone is one reason I'll never use it. I'm sure I'm a minority, but not zero.

>Our PMs don't like making things opt-in

Then refuse implementing it. Have some dignity for God's sake.

> Our PMs don't like making things opt-in.

“Ze engagement metrics must go up on ze dashboard every quarter, jah!” I can’t wait for the day PMs and other parasites find a new industry to move to. They sure have sucked the fun out of this one.

>Our PMs don't like making things opt-in

That is an implementation detail. What matters is the outcome:

Notion leadership has signed off on this being opt-out.

The calculus here, as you indicated, was that opt-in has little buy-in.

What leadership didn't take into account was the risk of this being publicized, and the blowback from this awareness.

That, or leadership has already calculated that not enough people will care (possibly true).

I suppose it's then up to those that do care to make more noise about this, to tilt the odds?, so this specific calculus (also known as enshittification) doesn't keep occuring (i.e, if the blowback costs are disproportionate to the value provided by default opt-out....)

thats a red flag imho

> Our PMs don't like making things opt-in.

Whenever people on HN and else where present you the mustache twirling evil Microsoft or Apple or Google C-suite/board who are trying to enshitificate a product or a tool because they don’t care, always keep in mind that the reality is often a lot more mundane than that.

The application that is “sneakily” listening to you and transmitting everything you say to their servers can be a legitimate product of a mustache twirling villain, but it’s a lot more likely (in my experience) that a group of 5 engineers and a PM were tasked by “Present relevant products from our company to the user” task and someone was like “what if we record what they are saying (or just zip-up their entire ~/Documents folder), run it through an LLM on our server and prompt it to analyze their convo or documents and recommend one of our products to sell to them? Sounds good to me, no?”

The application is almost certainly sending off data to Notion without consent, you just wouldn't be able to tell.

If a company is willing to do even small privacy violations, I do not trust them at all. Feel free to run OpenSnitch or LittleSnitch - most apps are opening connections to many domains you won't recognize. Your guess is as good as anyone's what data they're exfiltrating. That is, of course, unless you use more privacy-preserving apps that are typically opensource.

This could be a good feature in open source software packaged by Debian and whose build is reproducible.

People being angry here shows how they distrust software they use and distrusting always online software causes fear and stress.

The best these people can do is relying on free software distributed in a sane way because that's what can help trust software, and, in a professional setting, to push their companies or their providers towards free software as well, and demand guarantees that their privacy is respected.

These matters are not theoretical and this discussion is a witness of this.

If Notion wants to be trusted, they should go open source. I see Notion people are here. Do it! Stop doing closed source software! That doesn't bring anything worth and see what badness it brings. Your value is elsewhere. It's in you expertise, your vision and how well you do things.

I work for an open source competitor (or at least in the neighborhood) and that works out well for us and has been for 20 years.

The day you open source your desktop client, you'll be able to show us the code and show that you indeed don't send audio records or related logs to your headquarters. We won't have to reverse engineer, sandbox just to be sure, and hope for the best.

Knowledge management software shouldn't hide knowledge.

In two party consent states, don't need explicit consent from the other party, you just have to tell them you're recording or using a live transcription service that captures but doesn't store audio. But explicit consent is better (which can just be them acknowledging what you said with "ok") if you ever need to defend yourself.

With Notion it's still you doing the recording, you're the one using software and clicking a button to record.

If you ask Notion to record will record if you don’t ask to record, we won’t record

"It's just one user, we have x users who haven't complained. Not an issue"

> Electron apps (including Notion) do this by default

Feels like a bad default, it teaches user to ignore and say yes.

This would certainly be news to me as well. Packet capture (even local) has historically required superuser perms, but I'm not up to speed on how MacOS permissions work in this regard since the launch of System/Network Extensions.

After writing the above, I've just reviewed [0] - as much as I could in 5 minutes - and as far as I can tell it confirms our understanding. To do packet filtering or interception or reading, you'd need to do [1].

[0]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/technotes/tn3179-u...

[1]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/NetworkExtension/c...

Fair enough, maybe it's the way they are surfaced that makes them hard to parse to me – I may just have to give it another shot

Yeah, we use yjs and a fork of y-sweet [0]. We have a custom-built control plane that allows us to support many different types of relay server configurations (including self hosting, multi-tenant, per-relay, per-document) and optimize for cost.

Your project looks cool -- especially sub-document support -- thanks for sharing

[0] https://github.com/no-instructions/y-sweet