Curated Defaults
S
- LikesWhen someone likes your post
- CommentsWhen someone comments on your post
- New FollowersWhen someone follows your account
- Direct MessagesWhen you receive a new message
- MentionsWhen someone tags you in a post
- RepostsWhen someone reposts your content
Did you know that Safari still holds close to 20% of the browser market share in 2026? Given Google Chrome's dominance, this feels... wrong.
It goes to show that if what you started with is sufficient, there's no need to change it. Why hassle with getting an entirely new browser if the one shipped with your operating system works just fine?
Most people don't necessarily care about all of the bells and whistles that their program offers them, but they do care about having the options available to them (see Autonomy Bias). Companies can leverage the options they mark as "on" by default to their advantage, knowing that most users will never bother to change them.
Looking at Apple's competitor Microsoft, they generated a bit of controversy around their Windows Recall feature because it was implemented in this way. Recall is a feature that records screenshots of your computer's screen in real time, feeding those images into an AI model that the user can leverage to reference information they may have vaguely remembered after the fact.
While this sounds great on paper, it comes with a whole host of privacy concerns. Passwords, credit card numbers, and other sensitive information are being fed into an AI model that could potentially be mined to reveal that sensitive information to others later. Despite this, Microsoft initially released the feature as a default option, making nearly a billion potentially unaware users susceptible to cyberattacks.
After public backlash, Microsoft eventually made the feature opt-in by default, but it goes to show how influential defaults can be when left unchecked.